Driverless Car Problems

645 Words2 Pages

Driverless car were introduced for the purpose of safety of roads and reduce the number of deaths caused per year by road accidents. Also a benefit is that it’s been said that it will be able to reduce traffic tremendously, saving a average person 52 minutes in a day. To some this is good news as in young people, collisions are the number one cause of death by “human error.” This is very beneficial to the sick, elderly, blind and disabled being able to easily transport to places with an emergency response system, voice command and drowsiness alerts at their service. The car cannot get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated. This could be by far the greatest developing technology in this century. Being able to text in a car with no hassle. Just great right?.
Too good to be true, well nothing comes with 100% guarantee when it comes to mechanical technology. This raises morals and ethical issues. Despite the claims of lesser road accidents and traffic. Can driverless car be trusted with not posing a threat? At times, airplanes and traffic control systems fail due to such technological anomalies. What’s to say that a driverless car can suffer a malfunction, what will be of then? Computers itself are never fully immune to the risks of crashing, malware interference and viruses.
Moreover, in an event of accidents the big question is who’s liable? Is it the Driver, car company or software creator? This raises major concerns. Is it technically his/her fault if a collision happens whilst the driver isn’t driving?
Is it right for a machine’s calculated decision should be versed against human’s natural intuition and discretion. If a stick is in the middle of the road the car will automatically stop with no warning causing the driver behind to ...

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...illed. NATO held responsibility for the deaths but this had an impact on the society. Is it right to put civilians life at risk by self controlling machines. Every software machine has the ability ‘to blow up’. It’s like a dormant volcano waiting to erupt at unknown times with no warnings.
Another example is drone strikes that are used by America. It has been thought to have killed 2,400 civilians in the last 5 years. This is due to the fact that the drones itself are unable to identify who is the suspect and who is innocent? Machine are unable to tell which is the enemy and only strikes the places it’s been allocated to attack too without analysing the risk of civilians involved. Should we put thousands of innocent at risk by machines that cannot tell the difference? This error has the potential to change minds of society about the risk of malfunction in machines.

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