Self-Driving Cars (Reading12-lgrazios)

The motivation for developing self-driving cars, according to Tesla, is to create a safer driver than a human driver, and to lower the financial cost of transportation for car owners and for people how use on-demand transportation services. The whole idea is for the self-driving cars to get rid of human error in the streets. This will have “perfect” computer drivers on the street and in turn it will create a safer environment in the roads. Some times even too safe, consider the Seattle Times article that mentions how self-driving cars are getting hit. This is because the way these cars drive is completely different from how humans drive and therefore it causes more accidents on the road. This in a way is causing our streets to be unsafe, but it is the peoples fault. If you consider that the reason the cars are getting hit is because the self-driving cars are driven differently to how we drive and we haven’t been able to adapt to how self-driving cars are driven. But then why should we, these cars should drive the same way we do and still be safe, unless we change all ­cars and drivers to be self-driving therefore maintaining consistency and a safe environment. Part of why these cars drive so differently from how humans drive is because of the Social dilemma of autonomous vehicles. Since as the Quartz article points out these cars are built on a checklist that tries to get all the attributes of driving like: “knowing the boundaries of the road, speed limit, reading street signs, detecting traffic lights, reacting quickly to unexpected objects and knowing where it is on map”. These are all characteristics that human drivers have but there is a key characteristic it is missing, and that is intuition. These cars will never have intuition, like the one we have to recognize what other people might be thinking and what might they do when we interact with them on the street, and that relates completely to how these cars drive differently. Another key question is determining what to do in life and death situations, who is liable and how do you determine whose life to save or sacrifice. If we where to be driving and we are on a life or death situation we are liable and we make or decision based on us and our responsibility, but a car lacks this and would therefore probably not know what to do so it is up to the programmer to decide who’s life to save. Personally I think I would want to have a self-driving car, especially for traffic. We usually waste so much time in traffic,  and self-driving cars could help put that time to a better use.