William Shakespeare once said, “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” By this he meant that fate does not decide what happens to one; rather, one’s destiny and life is in his or her own hands. One’s choices and decisions determine the course of events in his or her life. However, Shakespeare’s adage may no longer hold true. As self-driving cars flood the roadways, one’s life, quite literally, is no longer in his or her own hands. Human decisions are starting to become mute and futile in the car. Human lives are now being placed entirely in the “hands” of computers: a quite discomforting thought for some. For this reason, as self-driving car innovations are being made, many ethical concerns and issues are also arising. However, the fact stands that self-driving vehicles are the way of the future and, most importantly, a way to save lives and help the environment. First, self-driving vehicles significantly decrease the likelihood of accidents and the endangerment of public safety. In particular, according to research performed by the University of Michigan, computers are superior drivers in regard to reaction time, consistency, and speed control. These advantages allow …show more content…
Some are worried about ethical questions, such as “How will a car decide who to kill in an unwinnable situation?” Other questions include, “How should these cars be programmed?” and “Is it wise to hand over one’s life to a computer?” Though these questions are still unanswered, the fact that they exist shouldn’t mean that innovation must stop. If anything, these questions mean the exact opposite: innovation must increase as that is the only way for the unanswerable to become evident. In the end, despite these concerns and issues, the fact remains, self-driving vehicles are the way of the future. They are here and they are here to
Since the industrial revolution, the field of engineering has allowed society to flourish through the development of technological advances at an exponential rate. Similar to other professionals, engineers are tasked with making ethical decisions, especially during the production and distribution processes of new inventions. One field that has encountered ethical dilemmas since its inception is the automotive industry. Today, the dawn of the autonomous, self-driving, vehicle is upon us. In this new-age mode of transportation, humans will be less responsible for decisions made on the road. With the wide adoption of autonomous vehicles, there exist a possibility to reduce traffic-related accidents. Even though computers have the ability
Self-driving cars are now hitting a few roadways in America, and are showing people just a small glimpse into what could be the future of automobiles. Although Google’s self-driving cars are getting a lot of attention now, the idea of a self-driving car has been around for quite a while actually. These cars have been tested to their limits, but the American people have yet to adopt the technology into their everyday lives. A brief description of their history, how they work, and finally answer the question, will self-driving cars ever be adopted widely by the American public?
One reason driverless cars should replace human drivers is because they are safer and offer a comprehensive solution to a problem that plagues the entire world – automobile accidents. Currently, according to Ryan C. C. Chin, around 1.2 million deaths occur worldwide each year due to automotive accidents (1) and in the U.S. alone “more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in 2008, 90% of which died from human mistake” (Markoff 2). Most of these accidents involving human error are caused by fatigued, inattentive, or intoxicated drivers. However, according to Sergey Brin’s the Pros and...
(www.iihs.org., n.d.) This approach to driver safety also fails to address the source of our distraction and instead appears to have accepted that we will be focusing on tasks other than driving and therefore systems must be integrated into our perception process to correct the errors therein. For instance, adaptive cruise control slows the car to the speed of the car in front of us so that our reaction time is extended indefinitely. Blind spot monitoring allows us to change lanes without a shoulder check and some cars now alert the driver when drowsy behavior is detected. There may be truth in this theory but as Gibson and Crooks stated our perception of the risk and reward will change minute to minute considering the perceived risk which includes technological aids.
...ailable provide much more protection than harm to humans. Automotive makers should continue to offer safe features and advance the possibilities of a collision-free future as much as possible. Attention must also be turned to the potential harm new features could cause. Safety features should be a precaution, or safety net, to true accidents that happen. They should not continue to replace bad driving habits that are abundant in our country. By allowing computer technology to provide an instant fix to human error, the error itself is never corrected. When involving something as deadly as vehicle accidents, fixing the error is just as, if not more, critical as providing a safety net. The ninth commandment: thou shalt think about the social consequences of the program you are writing. How far will vehicle safety go until computers are driving the car for us?
In the past couple years, there has been a greater drive in making cars more technology based. The solution: self-driving cars. There are many different views on these new cars. Personally, I don’t think that they are practical. Self- driving cars are expensive and will not even expunge the risk of car accidents.
Ethical Dilemmas Facing Autonomous Automobiles In our current age of technology, it seems every day there are new ethical dilemmas in the information technology field. Living in Phoenix I hear about one, almost daily, especially with the recent death of a pedestrian who was hit and killed by an autonomous Uber car. Autonomous cars are no doubt the way of the future. However, with these leaps and bounds of self-driving cars, new ethical questions arise.
In normal automobile operation, the number of incidents where the driver has to choose between two options that both involve killing innocents is practically zero. So, while manufacturers may find clever solutions to these more extreme ethical dilemmas, and while lawyers and lawmakers may find a way to limit the carmakers’ liability, there are a number of ethical problems that self-driving cars may face that neither the manufacturers, the programmers, or the lawyers will consider. That is—while programmers may find ways to encode their explicit, idealized ethical rulesets into the cars, and even if these rulesets are (somehow) universally correct, and everyone agrees that its decisions are perfect—all humans have implicit biases, prejudices, and heuristics. These are unconscious, yet reflected in all of our actions. Troublingly, because they are unconscious, they are often also unacknowledged.
Not long ago, when people talking about self-driving cars, most of them would feel that is far away from us. But today, we can see from news that many IT companies are already created their own self-driving technologies. Self-driving cars can use a variety of technologies, like GPS, radar, computer version, to avoid obstacle and explore surrounding environments. In order to drive safely, self-driving technologies include drifting warning, blind-spot detectors, enhanced cruise control and self-parking. The first self-driving technologies can be traced from 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. At present, companies which are developing self-driving cars include Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, Volvo, Ford, Tesla, Baidu. Why do so many top companies want to develop self-driving
Although there are issues with implementing self-driving cars on the roads today, self-driving cars can ultimately benefit society. According to public announcements made by companies like Tesla and Nissan, we may start seeing self-driving cars on the roads within the next 3 to 6 years [Ref. 1 and 2].
Human drivers have instincts that cannot be duplicated by technology, but by that same token human error is not a part of a self-driving car. In addition, we also need to take into consideration the transition period, when there are self-driving cars as well as human drivers on the road. Humans can notice the other drivers physically signal to go-ahead, when at a four way stop sign or; offer an opening for the merging lane. This is an example of what human interaction is capable of, that self-driving cars will need to calculate in order to
With the advent of better AI and motion tracking, computers are already better drivers than we can ever be.
As the world becomes increasingly dependant on the simplicity that technology provides to everyday tasks. Automobile and technological companies are taken advantage of their knowledge of vehicles and technology to incorporate them together, to create self-driving vehicles. However, with any discussion about change, there will be controversy surrounding it. There are two understandings on how the future will pan out with the invention and usage of self-driving automobiles. From some perspectives, self-driving automobiles are costly, dangerous, and could lead to unemployment in the transportation sectors.
It might be hard to see where the self-driving car could have issues with safety but an interesting question arises when an accident is unavoidable. The question posed is “How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random?” (ArXiv). This is a very interesting question surrounding ethics. I’m not sure if there is a right answer to the question, which could stall the self-driving car industry. Before self-driving cars are mass produced a solution needs to be found to the question about unavoidable accidents. Although this question is a problem, there may not be a need to address the problem. It is said that “"driver error is believed to be the main reason behind over 90 percent of all crashes" with drunk driving, distracted drivers, failure to remain in one lane and falling to yield the right of way the main causes.” (Keating). Self-driving cars could eliminate those problems entirely and maybe with all cars on the road being self-driving cars, there would be no “unavoidable accidents”. Safety is the main issue the self-driving car is trying to solve in transportation and seems to do a good job at
Automotive executives touting self-driving cars as a way to make commuting more productive or relaxing may want to consider another potential marketing pitch: safety (Hirschauge, 2016). The biggest reason why these cars will make a safer world is that accident rates will enormously drop. There is a lot of bad behavior a driver exhibit behind the wheel, and a computer is actually an ideal motorist. Since 81 percent of car crashes are the result of human error, computers would take a lot of danger out of the equation entirely. Also, some of the major causes of accidents are drivers who become ill at the time of driving. Some of the examples of this would be a seizure, heart attack, diabetic reactions, fainting, and high or low blood pressure. Autonomous cars will surely remedy these types of occurrences making us