Driverless cars, are they Good or Bad idea?

Per Techradar.com, “a truly driverless car must be capable of navigating to a destination, avoiding obstacles, and parking without any human intervention.

To accomplish this, a driverless car must have an artificial intelligence system that senses its surroundings, processes the visual data to determine how to avoid collisions, operates car machinery like the steering and brake, and uses GPS to track the car’s current location and destination. 

Without an AI, cars cannot be truly driverless.”

There have been a number of accidents with these cars while in the testing phase. Such as the one where an Uber car killed a pedestrian. And Tesla also has some accidents where in one the driver was killed.

So it seems as the makers of these vehicles rush ahead to get their version of an autonomous car out to the consumer marketplace without proper safety standards in place. And yet while both local, state and the federal government have expressed reservations about the safety of this vehicles there are none in place.

What might happen is that the technology will have to pass and be adherent to some government standards of operation. This is probably the best thing that could happen. As the companies developing the AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that power the control systems of these vehicles have been in a race to be first to offer a truly autonomous car. And they have been a little sloppy in their testing safety standards, which has resulted in the above mentioned accidents.

The whole idea of these vehicles is that no human driver would be needed and thus lessen the chance of an accident. Unfortunately that has not been the case, at least so far. I think that more stringent standards have to be applied when doing testing in an uncontrolled environment, IE out in public. So it may be a good idea if the federal government comes up with some rules governing the testing and operation of driverless cars as soon as possible.

Science magazine has a very interesting article that I recommend you read if you want further information on whether we are going too fast in adopting driverless car technology.

Also per the same article in Science magazine, “Congress is now considering legislation that would allow AV-makers to deploy the cars so long as they are deemed as safe as current vehicles. What’s more, the conventional wisdom holds that the public will be much less accepting of crashes caused by software glitches or malfunctioning hardware rather than human error. “Society now tolerates a significant amount of human error on our roads.“”

So it is my hope that Congress gets off it duff and does enact legislation that President Trump will sign into law to protect the riding (driving) public from slip shod driverless car systems.

That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike