THE SELF-DRIVING CAR SERIES — PART 3
In the first part of our multi-part series on self-driving cars, we discussed the general overview and history of the concept of an autonomous vehicle. In the second part, we discussed the positives of the self-driving car. In this part of the series, we’ll discuss the negatives that can come about from having self-driving car technology become the mainstream.
LOSS OF HOW TO DRIVE MANUALLY
The more and more that autonomous vehicles become the norm, the less people will have to learn to drive a car manually. Even if one does learn how to drive in case of emergencies, a hazardous situation for a beginning driver could end in a catastrophe. You can think of it in terms of a time before smartphones became the norm. When I was little, I didn’t have a smartphone. I’m only 30, so I went through the transitional period in my development. When I was growing up, I knew all the phone numbers I had to know by heart. All of my friends, family, parents work, emergency numbers, my school, and so on. Now, people are growing up not knowing what to do if they are in a situation where they lose their phone. They won’t remember more than a few numbers. Why remember numbers when you have a phone more powerful than the Lunar lander in your pocket?
That’s what it will be like with autonomous vehicles. We’ll slowly give up the ability to drive so that we can let the car drive for us. We’ll think that we’ll still hold on to the knowledge of knowing how to manually drive a car, but it will slowly slip away. Businesses that run driving schools will shut down as the self-driving car becomes more and more ubiquitous. It will be like the scene in 1993’s Demolition Man when the auto-drive fails, and Stallone has no idea how to work it, but that will be everyone.
THE COST OF CONVERTING ALL VEHICLES
Whenever I see a high-tech game changer hit the market, I think about how amazing it would be to own one. But then I look at the price and think about how it will never happen unless it becomes so widely available that I can finally afford some version of it. Remember when flat-screen TVs first came out? It was amazing to have a TV as thin as an inch or 2 that you could hang on your wall… but I could never possibly afford one when they first came out. $10,000 for a TV? Are you kidding?
It will be the same with the first available autonomous vehicles. Producers of the cars are saying that everyone will be driving one within 5-10 years, but I have to ask, “Do you think we all have a minimum of $100,000 for a car?” No, we don’t Right now people aren’t even filling their tanks all the way up, and companies think this will be the norm in that short of a period? Wishful thinking.
It will take decades for the autonomous car to be even close the minority of cars on the road. This brings me to my next point with the problems of autonomous vehicles…
ACCIDENTS WILL STILL HAPPEN DUE TO HUMAN ERROR
Sure, the self-driving car will drive smoothly and navigate the roads safely, but that doesn’t take into account that the majority of people on the road will still be human beings driving 4-tons of explosive power that can crash into the autonomous car with little warning.
Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars undergoing tests on California roads since September, when the state began issuing permits to auto companies, have crashed.
But the cars, three owned by Google and one by Delphi, were in collisions caused by human error.
Driver inattention was behind the collisions involving the Google cars, said Katelin Jabbari, a spokeswoman for the tech giant, which is developing a fleet of autonomous vehicles.
The crash of the Delphi car was in October while the vehicle waited to turn left at a light. Another car crossed a median and struck it, company officials said. (Via LA Times)
As long as human are still driving on the road, the autonomous car can’t be a safe alternative. Human error will always play a part in throwing a wrench into the plan. What’s even more dangerous is that the passenger in the self-driving car will be even less attention to the road because they don’t have to be paying attention. They put their faith in the car driving them safely to their destination. Getting t-boned with no warning or no quick reactionary driving only makes autonomous cars a question of their safety on the road.
SECURITY CONCERNS OVER HACKING
When there is blanket coverage of a technological network, you can bet that it will be open to hacking attempts. The Internet has been around for 20 years, yet hacking has been a mainstay all over the world. The Chinese hitting America, America hitting everyone, ISIS taking selfies and posting it online before getting bombed because of their idiocy are just recent examples of hacking. The point is that when there giant network that’s interconnected, it can lead to widespread damage.
The 2003 Northeast blackout affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states. It was the first time in my life that I looked up to the sky at night as say the Milky Way. Such a small accident caused chaos to millions because of a software bug. Imagine if an entire network of transportation ran upon one of a few networks. When the power failed during the 2003 blackouts, most of the people I knew had no signal on their phones. There are only so many cellphone networks, but imagine if there was a dramatic outage of a potential autonomous car network? What would happen?
Cellphone providers have been around for a while, and they are still vulnerable to attacks. An autonomous network isn’t even in place yet and the potential calamity hasn’t even been theorized yet. If we get to the point where we’re all dependant on this network, and it fails, what are we going to do when the roads are clogged with people who can’t drive manually? With people who aren’t used to walking for a distance?
PERSONAL DATA COLLECTION CONCERNS
It’s no shock that when you have a huge network of cars that keep tabs on the location of the users of autonomous vehicles that data is collected, it could be a bit of a stickler to people. If you can’t even download an app without having to log-in to Facebook or use your e-mail, what do you think the data collection will be like when you do you daily errands, go to a friends, or do something you don’t want others to know?
Your car will have information about everywhere you go. Depending on the extent of what you do, this could mean that every time you go and play a lottery ticket could be debunked by you going to a house that your significant other can check off as a lie. I can see the court cases of spouses saying they just went to the store when they went to do something else. If you’re on a diet, your wife might find out that you’re eating a shame cheeseburger in a parking lot.
THE EFFECT ON PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION (TAXI, UBER, BUSSES, FREIGHT, LYFT…)
If the self-driving vehicle takes hold on the mainstream use of transportation, you better believe hundreds of thousands of jobs will be eliminated. Though some will still need drives, a majority of services that have drivers now will be ruled obsolete.
- Taxi Driver
- Lyft/Uber Driver
- Bus Driver
- Postal Delivery
- School Bus Driver
- Mail Delivery
- Chauffeur and Limousine Driver
- Travel Guide
- Rental Car Delivery Person and Attendant
- Funeral Coach Driver
- Pizza and Other Takeout Food Delivery
- Parking Control Meter Readers
- Amusement Park Ride Drivers
- Truck Drivers (long and short haul)
All of those (food delivery is a bit far off, but you never know) could be gone because of autonomous drivers. Why would you have to hire workers when the technology is there to do their jobs for them? Customers would way rather just pay a taxi cab how much it costs to get to one location and not have to tip a human driver.
Companies that ship products would rather not have to pay drivers to travel cross-country, which leads to sleep deprivation and possible accidents. The USPS could deliver mail to street mailboxes that could save billions of dollars on not having to pay a mail person’s wages to do their jobs. This could potentially lampoon the economy and make others even richer.
WEATHER EFFECT ON SENSORS
Living in Michigan, I have to deal with all four seasons. Sometimes, I have to deal with all four in one day. This makes driving a particular problem when it comes to autonomous vehicles. Most of the videos of the self-driving cars come from test tracks or roads that never have to deal with hazardous weather. In areas where you deal with blizzards, roads that are full of potholes because of a Winter thaw, severe rainstorms, and things like that, it seems like the autonomous car hasn’t really been tested to deal with this.
Being a driver in Michigan, I’ve been brought up to drive in all sorts of bad weather. Sure, inches of snow covering the roads is annoying, but I can still get through it because it’s second nature. However, I watch reports of an inch of snow hitting Atlanta that will shut down the entire city. To me, it’s hilarious, but knowing that a warmer climate city is not accustomed to this type of thing, I can understand why it will cause a panic.
Now, think about a car that’s programmed to drive a certain way. If you’ve ever driven in a blizzard, you’ll know that visibility is only a few feet if you’re lucky. The autonomous car can use GPS, but it also will have to use sensors that will attempt to give it accuracy near the car. If piles of snow are coming down around it, it could interfere with its accuracy. This also goes for rain. Have you ever put on glasses while you’re standing in the rain? Your eyes get warped because of the droplets on the lens. What if a rainstorm is so chaotic that it does the same thing? I’ve been in rainstorms on the expressway so bad that I had to turn on my emergency lights and pull to the shoulder because no matter how fast my windshield wipers passed, they couldn’t create the visibility needed to safely drive.
EXTERNAL PROBLEMS (POWER FAILURES) THAT AFFECT AUTONOMOUS FUNCTIONS
As mentioned above, the 2003 blackout caused chaos. Power was out all over the place, but I was lucky enough to live in a neighborhood that allowed me to get to a store that was located within the neighborhood. The problem for everyone else that wasn’t as lucky was that all the power was out. This meant that all traffic lights were out all over my state. My brother was on his way home from northern Michigan when the power outage hit, so when everything stopped, EVERYTHING STOPPED.
No lights worked, so now no cars could function correctly because of the stop and go traffic that it created. How could a self-driving car deal with a situation like this? When a car is programmed to deal with normal occurrences, a dramatic event could throw all that into the garbage.
What if the autonomous car is connected to a network that’s integrated with a local power source? Like the cellphone networks that failed, these could fail, too. Add on to the fact that humans in the car have little to no knowledge of how to drive a car are now stuck in a vehicle that they can’t control. This could be a slippery slope of events that could cause billions of dollars of damage.
OUT-OF-DATE GPS THAT AUTONOMOUS CARS RELY ON
This one is just common sense. Anyone that has used a GPS system to get directions has inevitably ended up at a location that was no longer there, wrong, or incorrect. My family works in real estate, and having GPS fail in giving me a location is something that happens all the time. Addresses are wrong, streets are often wrong, and duplicate addresses will lead you to a different city entirely. Imagining a system based off of GPS in a constantly changing environment is hard to believe being possible.
Go to Google Maps right now and hit the satellite view. You can zoom in on some features that have moved or changed. Streets that aren’t there anymore or streets that exist that aren’t shown. You could give your car a destination and end up somewhere completely wrong. It will be like sitting in the passenger seat with a friend and you notice they’re going in the wrong direction for 200 miles.
Trust me, I lived in a condo for a few years that didn’t show up on the GPS. Somehow, stalkers always managed to find me, but that’s another story.
LOCAL ECONOMIES SUFFERING DUE TO REDUCED POLICE CITATIONS
“Wait, who gives a BLEEP?” is what you’re thinking. I know, but you have to really think about where police, fire, and paramedics get their funding from. Human drivers like to drive fast, blow stop signs, drive and drive, turn left where it’s illegal, and so much more. This is where the police take out their pens and write tickets that set drivers wallets and purses on fire. Sometimes, they do so illegally, which cost me hundreds of dollars when a cop slowed down to 20 MPH in a 35 MPH zone in front of me just to get behind me and pull me over. Is that legal when there is no reason to pull me over? No. Could I have gone to court and given a 20 minute speech with facts to overturn the ticket? Yes, but I didn’t and paid the ticket instead, which is what they want.
The point is, local governments count on that sweet local penalty money to fund them. ‘Click It Or Ticket’ is a national event — usually in the Summer — that’s used to specifically take money from you. Autonomous cars will all but take the money from local governments because autonomous cars aren’t speeding to make a light. Autonomous cars aren’t driving recklessly. Autonomous cars are driving 100% by the law.
Turning this back to a necessary evil to bank accounts — the local government needs this money to operate. The lack of citation funding for local police, fire, and paramedics could harm the local safety of communities. With autonomous vehicles becoming the norm, traffic citations will be limited to a light being burned out, but the car will probably signal the owner to that immediately.
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX, BGR and by just looking up his name.
Contact: jeff@socialunderground.com