My Arguments Against Self-Driving Cars

Categories: Electric Car Electric Vehicles Self Driving Cars

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One of the key issues with regard to automated vehicles is risk. Specifically, popular concerns remain that self-driving cars are not entirely safe. While technological firms can undoubtedly succeed in testing their intelligent products within closed environments, they will eventually need to deploy fleets of self-driving cars on public roads at scale in order to determine their level of safety. In other words, driverless vehicles must share the road with their traditional counterparts, pedestrians and bicycles. This effectively puts the public at the center of potentially high-risk research environments.

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In reality, traffic accidents involving automated vehicles did occur. “In March 2018 an experimental Uber vehicle, operating in autonomous mode, struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona—the first fatal accident of its kind” – reported the Economists [1]. According to America’s National Transportation Safety Board’s report, the car made systematic mistakes when the perception system could not detect a person on her bike cycling nearby. Another accident regarding driverless cars occurred in January 2018, involving a 2014 Tesla Model [2].

In the Tesla incidents, the drivers set their autopilot feature to fully operate the vehicle with limited human interaction, leading to a number of fatal collisions with other vehicles or barriers when the autonomous system proved to be less than capable. Clearly, if the world’s top tech giants can still make deadly mistakes, no companies can assure that their experimental products are able to protect their users perfectly against any potential traffic risks on the roads.

The key solution to reduce the risk of self-driving car is not technology but human.

An omniscient AI knowing everything in a continuous, multi-agent, uncertain environment like traffic roads might never exist, even in hundreds of years in the future. In fact, given the statistics on the errors that cause car accidents published by the U.S. Department of Transportation[1.5], it is very likely that the technology in autonomous cars will make driving much safer for drivers and pedestrians. Therefore, the mission of humans is to adapt themselves to the future technology. Whereas governments should invest more in programs to prioritize safe travel behaviors, their citizens also need to raise their awareness on how to use and interact with driverless vehicles on shared roads, as well as equipping themselves with driving licenses so they can take control whenever unexpected situations occur.

In addition to safety, another concern raised in the response to ideas about self-driving cars is data privacy. The more information that a car decision-making process takes into account, the more it will interfere with data protection and privacy. For instance, a sensor system detecting “objects” such as human beings in front of a car is based on visual information. Even the use of such a system could violate privacy, if the data is recorded, stored or transmitted without the agreement of the involved people. The general question is: How much data is the car supposed to collect for making decision? Who has the right to access those data? When will these data be removed? Can the visual data be connected to other types of data like the phone number, the bank account, the credit cards, personal details, or health data? Moreover, even the data privacy of the drivers might be invaded, considering that cars and therefore private companies will know the driver’s most frequented places and may build a profile of the customer’s preferences and habits. Therefore, governments should impose new laws and regulations to protect consumers’ data privacy from being infringed. The drivers also should understand what type of data is being collected through their automated vehicles to protect themselves.

Beside ethical problems, increases in the use of autonomous car technologies might pose other liability issues. Back to the cases of the accidents, one important question arises: when a car causes physical damage to persons or property, who should be accountable for it, the drivers or the car manufacturers? This problem concerns both existing tort liability for drivers and insurers and product liability for manufacturer, as they together provide a current basis for governing crashes[3]. In fact, liability for incidents involving self-driving cars is a developing area of law and policy and is more sophisticated than one can imagine.