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| A Google Driverless Car |
A large number of advancements in the Mechanical Engineering
field revolve around automating current systems that are already in place. I’m sure that many of you have heard of the
new Google driverless car on the internet or in the news. If you haven’t heard of the proposed vehicle,
it is Google’s attempt at making a fully autonomous car that requires no user
input. They are still in the
developmental process, but it truly is a great feat of engineering. In my previous post I discussed the new Automated
Guided Vehicles that are released, and it seems like automated vehicles are
becoming the future. But as with all new
technologies in society, there are always ethical questions that arise.
The acceptance of driverless cars into everyday life
certainly has its fair share of ethical dilemmas. If a driverless car malfunctions and crashes,
who would wind up being liable? Would it
be the owner, the manufacturer, or the programmer? Will driverless cars cause people that drive
for a living to lose their job? What if
driverless cars act unpredictably and cause other human drivers to crash? How does someone program whether or not an
automated car should swerve to avoid a child in the middle of the street but
potentially harm its own passengers? A
great ethical dilemma which has been dubbed the Trolley Problem is humorously explained
in the video below. This dilemma also
applies to driverless vehicles. Who does
the car (the programmer) choose to save in all of the possible accident
situations?
All of these questions and more are things that would arise
if driverless cars were accepted into society.
These questions don’t have definite answers, and they cannot be easily
solved. I could spend hours talking
about all of these individual questions, but instead I am going to focus on
just one primary question-
Is the use of driverless cars in everyday life an ethical
decision?
Some of the reasons against having driverless cars are
presented in the questions above. People
that oppose driverless cars point out that are current laws don’t adequately
cover autonomous vehicles. If a person
were to hack into a driverless car they could cause accidents or even carjack
the vehicles. There will also be
significant problems with having driverless cars and human drivers together on
the road. There are a tremendous amount
of potential problems and difficulties that driverless cars may cause, but there are still substantial positive points.
To answer the primary question that I proposed, I would say “Yes”. I believe that the conversion to driverless
cars is the right decision. I have only
been talking about the negatives so far, but there are a few positives that I
believe drastically outweigh the negatives.
In the United States in 2012 there were 33,561 people killed in
automobile accidents, and 2,362,000 people injured. (Source)
Accidents are also the fifth greatest cause of death in the United
States, and a large part of these accidents are from automobiles. (Source)
I’m not trying to say that driverless cars will immediately solve all of
these deaths and injuries, but I believe that when we get to the point where
autonomous vehicles are perfected and implemented properly, the amount of
casualties and fatalities will just be a minute fraction of what it currently
is. And that is the future that I want
to live in.
Once this point is reached, traffic will also be much more
efficient than it currently ends up being.
A large number of traffic jams are caused by human error, and this can
be fixed. The cost savings for everyone
will be enormous once we reach this point.
There will be less vehicle repairs and maintenance due to better
driving, and there will be less road construction from accidents and bad
driving wearing down on the road. I
agree that there are a huge number of problems to overcome before we reach the
point of having driverless cars implemented perfectly, but I believe that
attempting to reach that point is significantly worth it. I would much rather have society worrying
about how to overcome the ethical dilemmas behind a handful of crashes rather
than avoiding these challenges and living with millions of crashes every year.
Additional discussions on this topic-
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