What Lies Ahead

It will be a scary day when driverless cars become the new normal. Imagine roads filled with cars, but the drivers are like unalert zombies. Sure having cars that drive themselves sounds splendid, but would the benefits really outweigh the cons?

For many people learning to drive and getting their license is a huge milestone. It is like one step closer to becoming an independant adult. I can't imagine teens growing up and never learning to drive. That would be like not learning to swim!

Driving is a skill that people need to aquire even if driverless cars become popular, because machines fail. You can't always depend on machines to be accurate all of the time. You might be thinking that machines don't make mistakes as often as humans, but humans are the ones that make the machines. What happens if you are riding in a driverless car and it just stops working? Will you just sit there and wait to die?

In the passage it says that most driverless cars aren't actually driverless, they need assistance from humans. The fact that the car does most tasks like steering, accelerating, and braking makes it easy for humans to get distracted. Most people get distracted by their cellphones alone! If they thought they could totally rely on the car to do what they needed, they would probably be totally unaware of their surroundings.

There is a reason that only a few states allow the use of semi-autonomous cars. The laws are written for cars that are controlled by humans. The laws in place currently would not be suffecient for self driving cars. Sure the laws could be changed, but who gets to decide what the guidless to self driving cars should be?

Human brains are easily adaptable, but machines need to be programmed. What happens when a car faces a situation that it isn't ready for? Also, what happens if someone hacks into the car's system and makes it malfunction? There could be a computer virus that would cause all the cars in the world to crash.

Although I do think there are lots of cons to driverless cars, I do acknowledge the benefits. Early versions of semi-driverless cars have been somewhat successful by driving half a million miles without a crash. However, that doesn't mean that totally autonomous cars will be successful.

I think certain feautres on cars like cruise control are a huge benefit, but I don't know if I'm willing to trust machines to take the steering wheel yet. Who knows, maybe fifteen years from now I will own my own driverless car, but there are some huge advances that need to be made first.