Self-driving Cars _ a Threat or Not?

Inventors and car manufacturers have tried to create a self-driving car for more than 100 years, but it’s been 3 decades since the first fully autonomous self-driving car was introduced. However self-driving cars have not become popular or mainstream due to a variety of reasons.

The first reason is that people are uncomfortable with the idea of a computer taking control of their car. They believe that as long as a computer is not as smart as a human being, it cannot be trusted with the job of driving. They are right to some extent because driving, especially in complicated situations, requires a high level of intelligence, while going on a straight line or making simple turns does not.

Another reason why self-driving cars are not popular is that they are prone to hacking. That means if a person can access the central control system of the car, they can easily change the direction of the car or cause accidents. This concern is legitimate because wherever computers are, we will have hackers who know how to enter the system and change its settings.

Another important argument against self-driving cars is that they cannot prove to be 100% safe. Even though human errors cause lots of traffic accidents, self-driving cars need to pass a higher standard in order to be considered reliable. In other words, if a self-driving car avoids 99 obstacles and hits only one of them, people will not regard it as safe enough, considering that thousands of self-driving cars will be around in the future and a 1% chance multiplied by thousands means thousands of accidents every day.