On Self-Driving Cars
Six years ago, Google raised eyebrows when it announced its development of the first self-driving cars and just last August, Uber rolled out its first batch of 100 driverless taxi-cars in Pittsburgh.
The development of these new and upcoming modes of transportation will undoubtedly shape the future of society. The main question that remains is, how?
To truly dig into this goliath of a question, we must first understand the many factors of which famous scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs of these self-driving cars had to take into consideration.
Much talk of autonomous vehicles (AVs) comes from discussions of economics due to the rise of public AV transportation. Experts McKinsey and Company estimate that “trucking companies could save up to US $500 billion dollars annually by 2025, as automated trucks deliver parcels, food and all things in between.” These savings will also see the cost of some goods lowered, boosting manufacturing. This, however, will subsequently result in the loss of jobs of many transportation operators (taxis, buses, truck drivers, etc.). In the short term, this may serve as an increasing strain on unemployment benefits, but in the end, the elimination of these jobs will give rise to different careers that will come about due to the rise of artificial intelligence. Although not all shifts in careers will be fluent and spontaneous, over time, the younger generations will be focused more on AI-based job opportunities rather than vehicle transporters. Over time, there will be an increase in demand for professional coders, mechanics, entrepreneurs, and data analysts, which will become ever more important as self-driving cars collect data about every single aspect of our day.
Indeed, driverless cars will provide a short-time decline in the global economy, but in the long run, they can add as much as $7 trillion to the global economy.
Without a doubt, however, the most talked about variable in the race for self-driving cars is safety.
Data provided by the National Safety Council estimates that roughly 40,000 people died in motor vehicles crashes last year, a 6% rise from 2015 and a 14% increase in death count since 2014, the biggest two-year jump in more than five decades. These results are at the hand of lower gas prices, increased motor-vehicle mileage, and the growth in risky activities such as speeding and driving while texting. It is clear, that we, as drivers, are paying less attention to the road and more attention to our own personal ‘convenience’ gain.
Evidently, human error was at a high; something needed to change, and change it did. Since 2016, there has been a massive influx of self-driving vehicle technology. Big companies such as Tesla, Apple, and Google have been investing lots of money in order to develop a car that is not only better than humans but one that is less susceptible to crashes.
Recently, Elon Musk’s Tesla Model S took its first fatal victim. Some critics bring up the incident of driver Joshua Brown who was supposedly watching Harry Potter on the TV screen of his vehicle during the collision. The car’s sensor system, against a bright spring sky, failed to distinguish a large white 18-wheel truck and trailer crossing the highway. In a blog post, Tesla said the self-driving car attempted to drive full speed under the trailer “with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S.” This fatal error in the new and advanced self-driving Tesla model, however gruesome, could be viewed as simply another example of failed technology. Many believe that from the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 to the recent exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s, it seems that advancements in technology are becoming the causes of countless, tragic accidents.
Although many critiques seem to be bringing up the few crashes revolving around AV crashes, human-operated cars are at an extremely higher risk for crashes, deeming them significantly less ‘safe’ (Figure 1).
In fact, Google’s spokeswoman Jacquelyn Miller recently made the following announcement regarding her company’s fleet of self-driving vehicles known as Waymo: “We just got rear-ended again yesterday while stopped at a stoplight in Mountain View. That’s two incidents just in the last week where a driver rear-ended us while we were completely stopped at a light! So that brings the tally to 13 minor fender-benders in more than 1.8 million miles of autonomous and manual driving — and still, not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.”
In addition, this brand of self-driving automobiles alone has the lowest at-fault rate of any driver class on the road — “about 10 times lower than our safest demographic of human drivers (60–69 year-olds) and 40 times lower than new drivers.”
These statistics are nearly identical to other self-driving car manufacturers as well. Tesla, after a fatal Autopilot-related crash in May, posted that this incident was “the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated.” When compared to human drivers, there is a fatality every 94 million miles. This 38% increased safety rate would mean that of the 1,000,000 or more annual crashes worldwide, approximately half of them would have been saved if the Tesla Autopilot was universally available, not to mention the obvious benefits gained from eliminating drunk drivers who take up around 2,000,000 driving collisions every year.
As of now, in the early development of this new machinery, self-driving cars are statistically “safer” than driver-operated vehicles. What we can do with this information is to not deem self-driving cars dangerous due to its one fatal crash, but rather accept the inevitable risk of traveling in cars due to our own willingness as a society to take on its risk, no matter the driver.
The last major key influence in autonomous vehicles is convenience. These up and coming vehicles will make our lives more convenient by allowing us to maximize our time spent commuting while simultaneously giving the benefits of personal, public, and private transportation. A Columbia University study shows that Uber will have a fleet of AVs ready by 2030. Approximately 9000 of these cars would be needed to satisfy and replace the whole of human-operated taxis in New York City. The study also proves that consumers would only have to wait 36 seconds on average for their taxi to pick them up.
The matter of convenience is where the heart of the problem lies, however. Is there a line that we should protect from going too far in automating our lives? Where do we start losing something instead of gaining? In other words, at what point do we begin to lose ourselves?
When Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, said his first words to his assistant, “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you,” who expected that phones would become such a major talking point in modern society? Who knew that phones would develop into landlines, which would later become flip phones, which would later develop into smartphones, which the average teenager would spend nine hours of their day on social media applications. Nobody knew.
Now the question is not whether or not self-driving cars will be beneficial in our modern day society because the answer is yes. The true aspect that we, as an advancing society of humans, should be taking into account is the unknowing risk of technological advancements, such as vehicle hacking, dangerous weather, and future weaponized vehicles. We must take caution and go into the race for autonomous vehicles with meticulous care for perfection.
The ‘unknown’ can be seen in 1221 during the fight for Chinese land. The Jin Dynasty and the Song Dynasty created and used the first bombs known to man. They hurled newly developed technology towards their enemies in the fight for political power. Nearly 700 years later, the many advancements in nuclear power and atomic energy have led to the risk of world annihilation. Clearly, the future of autonomous cars is not only unpredictable, but it can be frightening, leading us all to irrational outcomes.
As technology advances, we are often amazed by each progressive innovation since we do not have the ability to predict the future advancements. This same source of wonder should be a source of caution as we cannot predict the future advancements that often outpace our ability to handle them ethically.