Driverless Cars

So earlier this year, it happened.  I have been waiting for this to happen for a few years now and it was exciting.  This month, earlier, something else happened that a lot of people said would happen and would be the reason why they would never do this.

The first drive across the United States by a driverless car occurred and earlier this month, someone hacked a driverless car.  There are many benefits to everyone being passengers and no one being drivers.  There are a few disadvantages.  

It goes like this: you step into your car and you punch in, tell your car, where you are going and then it calculates how to get there and starts driving.  You get to your destination and it stops driving.  It enters into the grid with other cars all going to their separate destinations.  As you near your destination, the car alerts you, as not all destinations are perfectly accurate or not all roads are going to have boundary markers.   Each car has proximity detectors like radar that allows it to determine the distance to other cars and obstacles.  It has sensors that tell it where the road boundaries are and when there are stop signals and the like.  Each car has a manual override for driving off main roads and driveways, but it can't be engaged too often, or you risk an automatic fine.    

What are the advantages?  First, the car drives at the best speed for the road and the traffic level, based on the other cars on the road and at the appropriate distance too.  No tailgaters and no aggressive drivers.  Which brings us to the first disadvantages, loss of control.  Yes, everyone would loses the ability to control their vehicle all the time.  They would have to learn to get up earlier to get to work on time, like everyone else.  They would lose the thrill of weaving in and out of traffic to get a couple car lengths ahead and to go a little bit faster and maybe arrive at their destination a few minutes earlier. They would lose that little bit of control, but by losing that control, everyone would gain more safety on the roads.  

I have a friend who is missing his parents.  They were clipped by an aggressive driver who was passing two large vehicles just before a corner.  The highway in question, I know.  It is primarily a two lane highway with alternating three lane zones every five kilometers that allow passing in safety.  This aggressive driver killed my friend's parents last Saturday, but aggressive drivers like them, kill hundreds of thousands of people each year.  I just checked, 1.3 million people world wide, over 30 thousand in the US every year.  Removing the aggression out of driving would save lives, decrease medical expenses and insurance costs.

There would still be accidents, but with appropriate speeds and distances and better reaction times, even these accidents would cause less damage.  When there is an accident, people slow down to look and this causes traffic jams.  So in addition to less traffic accidents to look at, driverless cars, would allow the drivers to look and not slow down traffic.  Traffic accident looking is just one form of distraction and driverless cars would allow drivers to distract themselves as much as they want to, they could get in animated discussions, play with their phones, call people, text people, put on their make up, eat food, spill hot beverages, shave and engage in other activities with other consenting adults, all without causing and accident.  They could not be drunk, because they  might be more likely to try to engage the vehicle when they are impaired.

Yes, right now cars are open to cyber attacks and hacking, but this is because they have not thought out the security of these cars as much as they should have, but they will and it will be very secure.  I imagine that they will be more likely to be able to hack the computer that manages the destination of the car, but have the manager of the car's sensors be separate and part of the car on a separate computer.  Thus not hack able.  The hacked car might be given a destination of ignoring the road boundaries and slamming into a crowded sidewalk at high speeds, but the sensors would tell the car that there are people in the "road" and slow and stop.  If the attack killed people and these hackers killed 100 people a day, they would be as bad as it is happening today right now.  Most likely, cyber hackers would tell cars to go to the wrong destination, but they might try to kill one or two people, but they would be isolated incidents.  The real question is, is loss of control such a deal killer when aggressive drivers are real killers?