The implementation of self-driving cars in modern society will create threats to the safety of human drivers as well as pedestrians. Companies such as Uber, Tesla, and Volvo have begun to test their autonomous cars over the past decade. They have been in the spotlight more often over the past two years as the technology is quickly advancing and the cars are becoming available for public use. Recently, the majority of the headlines have been negative, most of which dealing with fatalities of the operators. Recently reported by The New York Times, Elaine Herzberg, a 49 year old resident of Arizona, was hit by a Volvo XC90 car while walking her bike across the road. The car was utilizing Uber’s autonomous mode and had a human operator inside. …show more content…
In modern times, people who work in the transportation/freight industry are responsible for getting products to various places all over the country. The majority of the produce and goods that we consume and use on a daily basis were transported to the grocery stores they were purchased at from far away, sometimes even overseas. Self-driving cars will take away these jobs and leave a dent in our workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the introduction of self-driving cars will cause a potential loss of up to 2.6 million jobs in the United States. Of these jobs, 1.7 million employ tractor-trailer truck drivers, 650,000 employ bus drivers, and 250,000 employ taxi drivers (Hayes, 2015). This is a huge problem as so many people depend on these jobs so that they can make a living. People in urban areas use taxis, buses, and other forms of public transportation daily to get to wherever they need to go. As of now, every single one of these forms of transportation is performed by a human, who is getting paid to do so. The addition of autonomous vehicles to society will eliminate all these jobs and leave millions of people unemployed with no income. The effect of driverless cars on the economy goes beyond taxi and truck drivers. People who work with drivers and driving-related occupations will also face the void of unemployment. The U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration reported that there were 15.5 million jobs working in an occupation relating to driving in 2015. On top of this, there are roughly three times the amounts of other jobs that include on-the-job driving. This larger group of workers includes people working in health care, waste management, construction, and for the government (Beede, Powers, & Ingram, 2017). 15 million workers are equal to about one ninth of the workforce, which is a
With driverless cars becoming more and more of a possibility in the near future, it has brought up questions about how it will affect our economy, as well as the jobs of the public. Uber drivers, truck drivers, cab drivers’ jobs are at risk along with the companies that provide them. Many industries may also be affected. There are an approximate “1.8 million heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in the U.S. earning a median income of $40,260 per year” (Bureau of Labor Statistics). 1.8 million people may seem like a small number compared to the 318.9 million individuals living in the U.S., but it will have a large effect on those drivers when they have to find a new job to support themselves
The goals behind self-driving cars are to decrease collisions, traffic jams and the use of gas and harmful pollutants. The autonomous automobile is able to maneuver around objects and create swift lines of cars on roadways (How Google’s self-Driving Car Works, 2011). The autonomous vehicle can react faster than humans can, meaning less accidents and the potential to save thousands of lives. Another purpose and vision for these cars is that vehicles would become a shared resource. When someone needed a car, he or she could just use his or her Smartphone and a self-sufficient car would drive up and pick him or her up.
The self driving trucks will decrease the number of deaths by decreasing the human errors that causes these deaths including; speeding,not paying attention to road, drunk drivers, texting and driving, and even being under the influence of drugs, which are large factors in today's deadly crashes between motor vehicles in not only the United States, but the whole world. A major issue that can happen and cause possible thousands of deaths is due to hacking the trucks software. Since the trucks are no longer controlled by a human and its main brain is a software system, which could be an easy target for terrorist attacks or just someone trying to hurt people. Although there is a slim chance of a harmful attack on these trucks technology, it would greatly impact the economy by reducing the price of products and goods. All products that are transported through trucks across the US would be less expensive due to the trucks being able to work during night time, burn less fuel, less rest stops, and less labor costs.
Almost 178,000 people are taxi drivers or chauffeurs. Think of New York, or places many of tourists go. All of those buses they ride (158,050 to be exact), Delivery services drivers, 797,010 of them, all of those jobs and their hard earned money will be gone because some robot will take it away. Yes, there could be less traffic and more of an experience but humans safety is more important . Stated in Text 3 “ Once cars drive themselves, food deliveries will be a matter of restaurants filling a car with orders and sending it off eliminating the need for a delivery driver. “ That person's job is gone. Now you could say that the postal services could benefit from this as stated in Text 3 lines 10-15 “ it would make sense for Postal Services to make use of the technology to deliver mail, especially in areas where curbside mailboxes are standard and it would be rather simple for a mechanical arm to deposit and retrieve mail directly“, but drivers like UPS or FedEx could face being shut down. Stated in Text 3 line 14, “ If they aren't replaced by Amazon's delivery drones first.” To compromise we could still have the human drivers and have a drones bring the package only a few yards from the truck to the
One of the major concerns will be the availability of these cars due to the high prices people are foreseeing to expect due to the advanced nature of the automobiles. Fortunately, companies like Nissan are focusing on affordability for average consumers, with Volvo following in its footsteps (Fagella). Another concern about self-driving cars is that they will take a substantial amount of jobs away from people that have jobs in transportation, such as taxi and bus drivers. This is no issue of concern, as transportation jobs fade, new jobs will be opened up in the industry. Car companies are planning to create new jobs to accommodate the production and assistance of the new cars, with Hyundai leading the pack expecting to add 3,000 jobs in the upcoming years and General Motors to add over 1,000 new jobs as well (Fagella).
In July 12, The New York Times reported a news: “Inside the self-driving Tesla fatal accident”, which again caused enormous debates on whether self-driving cars should be legal or not.
Companies like Google, Tesla and Nissan, among others, have announced over the past few years that their companies are trying to develop self-driving or autonomous cars [Ref. 1 and 2]. Self-driving cars can provide many benefits to the average consumer. Studies have shown that because computers can react and process information many times faster than a human being, crashes on streets and roads can be decreased with quick and consistent evasion maneuvers by the autonomous car. They can also help maximize fuel economy by calculating the most direct and fastest routes. When the driving of an autonomous car demonstrates that the computer can safely and reliably transport the passengers to their destination, this frees up the passengers to do other things that they would not normally be able to do if they were driving the car manually. For this reason, self-driving cars can help maximize productivity of their passengers.
In the future driverless cars will save big amounts of money when it comes to accidents. According to the report of NHTSA, “In 2010, there were 32,999 people killed, 3.9 million were injured, and 24 million vehicles were damaged in motor vehicle crashes in the United States. The economic costs of these crashes totaled $242 billion.” This is a huge amount of money that can create a positive impact on America’s economy. Some argue that driverless cars will take the jobs of taxi and truck drivers that will ultimately affect the US economy. This is not true because this a transition period, and the jobs will shift from one position to another but will not vanish. Overall the driverless cars are good for the
With the rise of ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft, autonomous vehicles have a real shot at becoming a leading mode of transportation. Technology is becoming a bigger part of each of our lives everyday, along with the unfortunate increase of laziness, this shows that the greater population would most likely benefit from a hands-free mode of transportation. Some think that this new technology will lower driving jobs and hurt the economy, but with all technology, someone has to fix it when it glitches. This new technology is going to open up job opportunities across many fields such as mechanical and computer engineering. Also, the economy will be thankful for the booming business that these autonomous vehicles are going to bring. Along with the great economic effects, autonomous vehicles will also prove to have a smaller impact on the environment and therefore we will have less air pollution. Air pollution is a serious problem in America, being the worst in cities with high amounts of traffic. Fuel being pumped into the air will be a thing of the past when autonomous vehicles take over, and the economy will like it to. Although, economic effects seems to be the least of worries as scientists are struggling to solve ethical
The idea of self-driving vehicles raises many questions and concerns. It is a policy topic that has implications for numerous policy areas such as health, privacy, environment and urban planning, economic growth, security, and accessibility. For each of the policy areas that it will affect there will be some support for it through it’s advantages as well as some criticisms from it’s disadvantages. Starting with the healthcare sector, there has been various arguments in support for automated vehicles. One of the advantages is healthcare will be positively revolutionized, meaning with automated vehicles, it is expected to result in fewer injuries and lower costs.
Self-driving cars are the wave of the future. There is much debate regarding the impact a self-driving car will have on our society and economy. Some experts believe fully autonomous vehicles will be on the road in the next 5-10 years (Anderson). This means a vehicle will be able to drive on the road without a driver or any passengers. Like any groundbreaking technology, there is a fear of the unforeseen problems. Therefore, there will need to be extensive testing before anyone can feel safe with a vehicle of this style on the road. It will also take time for this type of technology to become financially accessible to the masses, but again alike any technology with time it should be possible. Once the safety concern has been fully addressed
“The Nation lost 35,092 people in crashes on U.S. roadways during 2015” (Traffic and Safety Facts 1). Though this number seems horrific, especially when one considers the sheer number of people on the road each day across the nation, new innovations are constantly being featured in our transportation, in order to reduce the number in deaths on U.S. roadways. The transportation industry seems to be constantly evolving and changing to keep up with the needs of its consumers. Ever since the emergence of the motorized vehicle, several innovative opportunists such as Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Tim Cook have understood the need for swift movement of peoples, and have built their careers on the advancement of the transportation industry. Due to their efforts, new technologies have been introduced onto the market that enables the creation of a fully autonomous car.
I will argue that due to Uber’s previous improprieties they should not be the company to disrupt the transportation industry through the implementation of erroneous autonomous vehicles alongside human drivers. Ms. Cole’s story foreshadows an era where perfectly programmed autonomous cars clash with human error in a contest between pre-programmed and unprogrammable contingencies. Although the implementation of autonomous vehicles are supposed to make the roads safer, the reality is that human drivers have an advantage that robots and sensors do not: the ability to predict human behavior. The peer-reviewed journal article, An autonomous driverless car: an idea to overcome the urban road challenges published in the Journal of information Engineering and Applications by Sheetal Ds Rathod of Amaravati University defines an autonomous vehicle as “a passenger vehicle that drives by itself” (Rathod). Autonomous vehicles function by using an array of laser sensors, cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors, and GPS to help the car determine where it is in relation to the road and the other cars around it.
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
Automotive executives touting self-driving cars as a way to make commuting more productive or relaxing may want to consider another potential marketing pitch: safety (Hirschauge, 2016). The biggest reason why these cars will make a safer world is that accident rates will enormously drop. There is a lot of bad behavior a driver exhibit behind the wheel, and a computer is actually an ideal motorist. Since 81 percent of car crashes are the result of human error, computers would take a lot of danger out of the equation entirely. Also, some of the major causes of accidents are drivers who become ill at the time of driving. Some of the examples of this would be a seizure, heart attack, diabetic reactions, fainting, and high or low blood pressure. Autonomous cars will surely remedy these types of occurrences making us