Self-Driving?

Development of self-driving or autonomous cars is at a point where vehicle testing is now taking place on public road. My question is why? What real purpose will such cars serve?

            Let’s say you have such a car that drives you to work or to visit your mother-in-law, what is the advantage for you as you sit in the passenger seat and watch your car navigate the traffic? Will your car engage in conversation? And what about when it waits for you? What if it’s tempted to visit with a new model a couple of blocks over? Will your car return?

These are all questions that to me need answers because I believe that all artificial intelligence faces flaws at one point or another. Just take your computer, for example. Some days it simply decides to shut off and you have no idea why. Imagine if self-driving cars at some points decide to all stop working. Now, that would be the traffic jam from hell, would it not? And what about if someone finds a way of hacking your self-driving car’s program?  You may never find it again as you have to walk.

Of course, the worse scenario would be if self-driving cars killed people as it happened in Arizona recently. The poor woman was simply walking her bicycle across the street when the robot car hit and killed her. If, as proponents say, the purpose of autonomous driving is to make the operation of vehicles safer, an awful lot more work is required.

Cars have various degrees of automation. On a scale of 0 to 5, 0 is essentially cars as we know them where humans make the operating decisions, at 2 and 3 humans are helped by automatic components in the cars, i.e. automatic stopping in case of danger, while at 5 it  is totally autonomous, i.e. requiring no human involvement in the driving process.

While we don’t know how such technology would affect us, it is certain that there could be advantages for people with mobility problems or who are disabled. Self-driving cars would open up a whole new world of freedom for them. Certainly nobody could object to that.

 But until these cars become a reality, there are many questions that beg for answers.  One that comes to mind: would you trust your self-driving car to drive your young grandchild to a relative without anyone else in the car?

Perhaps that’s the first question we all need to ask.