Car accident a growing major cause for unnatural death every year, and over-speeding as well as collisions are two of the major cases that lead to fatal injuries. Even just simply considering these facts, I am completely supportive for self-driving cars. The rigidness of computer programs is a great advantage in the case of self-driving cars. Because the as long as the self-driving systems are more programmed and fully tested, they can avoid the lack of concentration and other errors human would commonly make. Mostly likely, with a stable control of speed, application of self-driving car could significantly decrease the number of potential accident caused by over speeding. From another perspective, if self-driving technology is widely utilized in industrial transportation such as shipping trucks, it could help with better revenue management by lowering the cost of labor forces.
However, while there are pros, there are also cons for self-driving cars. At least at its current development stage, self-driving technology still has many flaws and thus bares arguments. While the technology theoretically reduced the danger of driving, it is still incapable in some situations where prompt and improvised human actions are required. The article “What We Know and What We Don’t Know About Accidents Involving Self-Driving Cars” gives and example of Google’s self-driving cars, which are tested and announced safe, yet still caught into accidents like rear-end crushes. The programming is apparently less reliable than a human in such cases. Another argument criticizes the safety of such systems for that they have limited ability to make trade-off decisions when they are programmed to primary protect the car from hit. Because decisions made by such programming will potential lead to fatal injuries in cases where a car runs into people in order to avoid a collision with an object. Besides the uncertainty about the liability and safety of such technology, people, mostly truck drivers, are also not so positive towards the potential economic consequences such technology will likely bring. Because, even though self-driving cars could save business operator a great amount of capital from hiring drivers, it would meanwhile raise the unemployment rate among truck drivers. But Innovation Economics thinks such concern is unnecessary. Similar to the industrialization and mechanization of agriculture industry, in the case of such technological advancement, we can be reasonably assured that the economy will not only recover from the loss of truck driver jobs, but become stronger as a result of innovation. A lot of issues related to self-driving cars as mentioned above are yet solved at current development stage. And it is the stage where the government should take an active role in regulating self-driving cars to support the development. It should articulate every possible rules as comprehensive as possible to build people’s trust on and reassure them with any concerns. Unfortunately, the government is not performing well in this aspect so far. States and federal governments should work together to build an applicable regulation system for the new industry as soon as possible, or else more loss would like Tesla incidents would happen. I would be willing to own a self-driving car in the future, but certainly not with its current development with the deficiencies in programming maturity and under-established legitimized regulations. Besides, even though I agree that personal-owned self-driving car would potentially be a trend in the future, I think we will more likely see a wide application of the technology in shared or public transportations. But, indeed, either way, I believe that the automation vehicle technology will bring a subversive reformation to the world’s transportation system.
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