Negative Effects Of Self Driving Cars

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If you need a way to make a product more appealing to consumers, make it self-operating. The most recognizable and popular one of these products may be the self-operating vacuum. Why take time out of your day to vacuum when you can have a little robot do it for you instead? That mindset is now being applied to pretty much everything now. The next thing up is the self-driving car. Why waste valuable time focusing on driving when you could instead be getting work done on your drive to work. It is true that self-driving cars come with positive and negative effects, but I believe that the positives outweigh the negatives. One aspect of life the self-driving car would have an impact on is the environment. The plan with self-driving cars is to not …show more content…

The self-driving car would cause many people to lose their jobs. The careers that would no longer be needed due to the self-driving car include but are not limited to those who drill oil, taxi drivers, and personal injury lawyers. If self-driving cars were electric, oil drillers would be needed less and a majority could lose their jobs. If there’s self-driving cars, there could easily be a self-driving taxi service. If self-driving cars reduce accidents a majority of personal injury lawyers’ business would disappear. Also the gasoline industry would suffer, affecting stockholders, and there would be no need for drivers’ education …show more content…

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

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