Category: Cars

Self-Driving Cars: Pros and Cons Essay

Posted on | by Laureen

Self-Driving Cars: Pros and Cons Essay

“We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort” (Owens). And that is what most self-driving car companies have done, with the help of artificial intelligence and professional engineer, and the great effort put in by them, we can get in a car and go to destinations without doing work. Self-driving cars are really beneficial especially for those with disabilities such as no legs etc., as this will help them get to where they need without relying on others, according to Futurism.com that it increases safety and 1.2 million worldwide are killed each year in traffic accidents.

Less traffic as it will fully rely on artificial intelligence. Buying a self-driving car will save up a lot of money as there will be fewer accidents and therefore fewer hospital visits. Although self-driving cars have many benefits they also have disadvantages mentioned in this essay.

The way that self-driving cars are structured is very similar to how facial and voice recognition is built into our phones where it has the ability to learn certain algorithms based on how it’s being used. Like any cell phone or electronic device, self-driving cars can crash and cause some serious problems. One major disadvantage of self-driving cars is the high risk of technical issues that might come up with the passenger inside the vehicle.

Tesla, one of the most advanced car companies in creating autonomous cars (Alvarez, 2019), has frequently stated that their cars have “the lowest probability of injury ever tested by the agency in its safety ratings program” (Washington Post). Yet questions arise on how well would they function in contrast to a human-driven car. Rodney Brooks, an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence research director, believes that “even with an appropriate set of guiding principles, there are going to be a lot of perceptual challenges … that are way beyond those that current developers have solved… and perhaps a lot more automated reasoning than any AI systems have so far been expected to demonstrate” (Brooks). Self-driving cars have a high risk of being hacked. There have been multiple experiments done on driverless and even human-driven cars by hacking into a vehicle leading to serious car accidents and possible identity theft. Until autonomous car companies are able to prevent these issues, self-driving cars remain to have higher risks of threatening human life. A disadvantage that self-driving cars have is they cannot detect damaged roads and as a result, they can drive over it causing damage to the car and passengers. Self-driving cars are not fully aware of their surroundings like not stopping or slowing down when a school bus is dropping kids off, another example is a construction worker communicating with passengers to stop or move, and self-driving cars won’t understand.

Damaged roads are a common issue faced in major and minor cities, and self-driving cars are not as developed, when there is a broken road on the way, we human drivers avoid the damaged part of the road as soon as we notice it, this not the case with self-driving cars because they wouldn’t avoid it and drive over it, as a result, this can potentially damage the car and may cause harm to the passengers, in order to fix this problem engineers and computer science professionals should do more studies about implementing a front camera that can scan the road from a long-range, this will allow the self-driving cars to avoid those damaged roads and avoid harm (Ng et al., 2019). Another problem in self-driving cars is when the car approaches an elbow road, it cannot recognize the traffic at the end of the elbow road and wouldn’t decelerate and it would brake immediately and this sometimes can cause the car to crash (YouTube, 2019).

Human drivers usually understand how to act in certain situations such as slowing down when kids are walking around the street or stopping driving when a school bus is dropping kids off, also if a construction worker is trying to communicate with cars to stop or move the self-driving cars would not understand, to solve this ongoing problems engineers and computer science professionals should build a 360 degrees camera over the car that can recognize and understand everything mentioned above and build advanced cameras with infra-red technology and do further studies on those constraints. Hacking the system in a self-driving car can potentially cause major problems and so, system engineers should create a powerful system that cannot be hacked into and do a lot of tests to make sure.

References:

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