Self-driving cars is a big topic in the technological world for decades. Having the ability to sit back, relax and even sleep during your daily commute or road-trip. It sounds like an amazing idea to some and might be nightmare to others.
Whilst this topic increases interest to many, and we are closer than ever making this our reality. In this blog I would like to talk about the history of self-driving cars, and the pros and cons.
Starting off let’s look how this technology came to life and the changes that have happened throughout recent years.
In the 1990, people at Carnegie Mellon University started working on vehicles that through the use of computers and positioning devices could aid the driver. By using these systems, the cars could avoid obstacles, maneuver in rough terrain, autonomously keep the vehicle in lane (with warnings for the driver when the car was departing the lane) and warn the driver if they were going to fast into a turn (Todd Jochem, 1995). In 1995 their vehicle successfully completed a coast-to-coast drive through the United States of America, with little aid from a driver (Self-Drivng Cars, 2022).
Later, in 2013, Top Gear has shown the Oshkosh TerraMax, a fully autonomous military truck from the USA. This vehicle used 64 lasers that scanned the terrain ahead, which was later interpreted by the computers in green and red squares. The green squares indicated terrain the truck could manage to go over, whilst the red ones were terrain that the vehicle should avoid (Oshkosh TerraMax, n.d.).
On this basis the TerraMax could choose its own path, but the general route that the truck would take was input by a human before it took off.
Nowadays, Waymo, a sub-brand of google, the leader in self-driving cars, provides a driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona. They have achieved this with the use of 360 cameras, radars, lidars and AI. With the use of their sensors, they create a 3D model / picture of the car’s surroundings, which is later analyzed by AI and the best and safest route is then chosen (Waymo, 2022). Another major “player” in this industry is Tesla, which is trying to implement self-driving into their cars. At this point tesla has only released betas for chosen people to test.
Future, Sci-fi movies have shown us that this is one of the possibilities how our future will look like, having no drivers in the cars, just sitting back and enjoying the ride. Moreover, the image that is portraited to us makes us believe that his is the perfect solution and will help us as humanity be more organized.
Let imagine a scenario where all the vehicles are self-driving. First thing that would happen is a significant decrease in the amount of traffic jams, something that everybody wants to see. I believe this will happen because all vehicles could be synchronized, improving the flow of traffic. Another major benefit would be a drastic decline in the amount of car accidents (this doesn’t mean that they won’t happen). Moreover, a less important matter that would change, is that road rage incidents would mostly disappear. Since people won’t be able to blame the other person for something they didn’t like.
One important challenge with this idea is a large amount of people enjoy driving. They will never give up something that they enjoy doing just to have a machine to autonomously commute from point A to B. As this is a blog, I can share my opinion: I stand with people that think like this, making it impossible to have a society that only uses self-driving cars.
This introduced another problem. Human behavior isn’t predictable for machines / AI and vice-versa. We as humans make lots of unpredictable and rapid movements based on emotions and what we believe will happen in certain situations. That is much different than a machine that needs to calculate everything that is going to happen before it happens. If it can’t calculate what a person around them will do, it is going to cause an accident. Looking from the human perspective, accidents will happen on the same account as the machine. We won’t be able to predict what the machine will do in certain situations. What creates another issue with this technology: who will be held accountable for an accident? The most logical way, I think, it will be determined is by looking at the self-driving vehicles cameras and then deciding if the human driving caused the accident. Another risk I see is the usability of these cars in any conditions. Their entire existence is based on sensors than scan their surroundings. But what if they are blocked due to snow, ice or dust built up on the cars.
In situations like these, how will the self-driving cars be able to “see” what going on?
Concluding, this technology has gone a long way since it started being developed. It is amazing to see how far we have come with technology throughout recent years. No doubt one day self-driving cars are going to become a reality. Nevertheless, I believe there are many hurdles that people developing this technology need to overcome, also the legal side needs to be looked over as well.
Feel free to comment, I look forward to hearing what you guys have to say about this topic.
Bibliography
Todd Jochem, D. P. (1995, September 25). Todd Jochem, Dean Pomerleau, Bala Kumar, and Jeremy Armstrong. Retrieved from Carnegie Mellon University education : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tjochem/nhaa/navlab5_details.html
Self-Drivng Cars. (2022, November 15). Retrieved from Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car
Oshkosh TerraMax. (n.d.). Retrieved from TopGear Fandom: https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Oshkosh_TerraMax
Waymo. (2022). How our cars drive. Retrieved from Google/ Waymo: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190838?hl=en