Autonomous Cars & Their Ethical Problems

Rooshi
2 min readJul 6, 2021
Advertisement for fake company “Drive Smart” vouching for auto-pilot driving

Self-driving/autonomous cars bring up a lot of ethical issues, namely, if self-driving cars can be trusted enough to be at least as safe as humans driving a car. When it comes down to it, I believe that auto piloted cars are way more safe than a human driving. Self-driving cars are just simply more aware, they don’t get tired, they’re incomprehensibly fast, foresee a possible collision, and make accurate decisions and execute them faster than any human could. Auto-piloted cars already roam the roads, but as of right now are not up to par enough to drive without any supervision, which is understandable, because they still have a higher crash rate than man-piloted cars, that being said, the collisions from auto-piloted cars are much less significant. I believe though that we are only a year or two away from a technology that is so polished that it is much safer to be in an auto-piloted car than driving yourself. The future of auto-piloted cars would be able to let people who cannot drive be able to get where they need. Children who need to get to school, disabled people who need to get to work, or elderly people who can no longer drive, and want to visit their family. I’ve always thought to myself that if every car was auto-piloted and could communicate with each other, there would be zero car accidents, except in the case of a glitch, or another computer ethics problem, a hacker. This is my only concern for the well being of auto-piloted transport, the security needs to be absolutely perfect or the risk of your car being hacked and taking you somewhere you don’t want to go or purposefully crashing yourself into someone else is something that would be on a lot of people’s minds. I know all the bugs and issues will get ironed out, and very soon people will be able to sleep in their cars on the way to work and our future will look a little something more like Back To The Future thought the year 2015 would look.

--

--