“Are driverless cars safe? Uber fatality raises questions”
This is the headline of the article and question that CNET asks. With a driverless Uber hitting and killing someone walking along the side of the street, the police now have to decide who is at fault: The pedestrian, the driver, or the robot/AI technology?
I think this will be the litmus test for whether the technology can survive or grow in the future. If I had to guess, I would say while this is a technology milestone and it’s never really happened before, the growth into driverless cars is unavoidable. I remember seeing this idea first addressed in the I, Robot movie with Will Smith. As his character takes over the wheel of his Audi, he later has an unavoidable crash (it’s bound to happen if countless robots are jumping on your hood trying to kill you) but after the crash, his police team want to blame him for taking off the auto-drive function and supposedly being the reason for the crash itself. So in the future, will we be pressured not to take the car off automatic, not to drive it ourselves?
Personally, I still think driverless cars will be safer than cars with drivers. Sure there will be fatalities, but it’s unrealistic to think that any kind of driving can be victimless and perfect, considering how many roads we have and how many cars are on those roads at any given time. Perhaps what scares people more is the illusion of being in control of whether or not they get hurt or hurt someone else. But is that any different from getting hurt in a train, plane, bus, or ship?
You can read more about the CNET article here: