The love and pain of driverless cars

For ordinary people, driverless cars mostly only exist in science fiction movies, but now they are gradually becoming a reality and getting closer to life step by step. The emergence of driverless car technology can greatly reduce car accidents and traffic congestion. But behind greatness there are often hidden worries.

Concerns about driverless cars

On May 7, 2016, a fatal car accident involving a Tesla self-driving car caused people's fear and concern about self-driving technology.

Google engineers must have a deep understanding of this saying: "When God wants to give a man a great responsibility, he must first make his heart and soul suffer and work hard." Google's engineers must have a deep understanding of this saying. Since 2009, Google has been researching driverless technology for 7 years, but it still faces many difficulties in bringing it to market.

Although Google's driverless car has traveled 2 million miles, it still cannot predict all road conditions. Google engineers have said that with Google's current technical level, it is still difficult to ensure complete driverless driving. For this complex world, driverless car technology still seems a bit powerless.

The bigger hidden danger is, who controls the background code of the autonomous driving system developed by engineers? Like all systems or software, the program will have loopholes. Once people with ulterior motives use these loopholes to commit crimes or hack into the system, the risk of endangering life will be extremely great. In the future, will people really be willing to entrust their lives to a few lines of code?

Another pressing issue is the ethics of robots. In real life, people often face moral dilemmas. As artificial intelligence becomes more and more advanced, machines will also face the same problem. For example, suppose a self-driving car is about to hit another car with three people in it. It can turn to avoid it, but it will hit a child on the sidewalk. How should it choose, and have the designers designed the best response for them? Ray Kurzweil, engineering director of Google, once gave the answer: We don't know.

Legal issues are also extremely thorny. If a self-driving car gets into a traffic accident, how is liability determined? Currently, when an accident occurs between one car and another, the driver is often responsible because he is a person with legal subject status. However, robots are not people, and granting them legal subject status is not in line with social common sense. Therefore, according to existing laws, when a self-driving car has an accident, perhaps we can only hold the manufacturer responsible. In the long run, the accumulation of compensation for each accident will be enough to bankrupt some car manufacturers.

The future of driverless cars

On August 18, Uber announced a partnership with Volvo to invest $300 million to launch a self-driving taxi test at the end of August. This is not the first company to launch a self-driving taxi. Not long ago, Singapore's driverless taxi company nuTonomy opened its self-developed driverless taxi to the general public for testing, becoming the world's first publicly tested driverless taxi. Driverless cars will be the first to be widely used in the taxi industry.

Here we need to mention the difference between automatic driving and unmanned driving. The general view in the industry is that Google's third-generation driverless car represents driverless and self-driving. Its core feature is "autonomous driving at all times, refusing human intervention in driving", so for a true driverless car, there is no need for a steering wheel. Autopilot means that the car can only make limited self-decision-making and does not have completely independent thinking and decision-making capabilities. Humans can take over the steering wheel when necessary. Therefore, the driverless cars that people sometimes talk about are not truly driverless, but merely automatic driving.

Some media have summarized the benefits that driverless cars will bring us in the future, such as reducing the number of traffic accidents and saving millions of lives. Because driverless cars are optimized in acceleration, braking, and speed changes, they will help improve fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It will also greatly change consumers' "travel habits", tempting them to give up buying private cars and use on-demand robot taxis instead, thereby reducing traffic congestion and giving everyone more free time, etc.

For the automotive industry, the emergence and popularization of driverless cars will inevitably lead to a further reshuffle of car companies. Traditional car companies will be acquired by companies with strong technical strength because they cannot keep up with the pace of technological change. In addition, driverless cars will also drive the development of related industrial chains, such as the in-car entertainment and gaming industry, driverless car maintenance, insurance, etc.

Like VR, driverless car technology represents human imagination of the future. Even if it is not perfect at present, it has created many possibilities for us in the future.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.