Journal 6 By Lyric

1. Who is Urmson, and why is he a trusted source on this topic.

Chris Urmson, who is the author of this article “Progress in Self-Driving Vehicles (2015),” is head of engineering for Google’s Self-Driving Car Project (Urmson, 5). The Google Self-Driving Car is a project by Google that involves developing technology for autonomous cars, mainly electric cars (from Wikipedia, Google Driverless Car, April 5^th, 2015). So in this sense, the sources about Self-Driving cars from Urmson definitely are advanced and convinced.

2. What are some ways that Urmson argues self-driving vehicles are important for the future? Can you think of some negatives or challenges that this kind of technology might face? What is your opinion—would you want yourself, your family or your friends to drive these automated vehicles?

As the author, Urmson, states in the article “Progress in Self-Driving Vehicles” that “traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for individuals aged 4 to 34 in the United States (Hoyert and Xu 2012)”(5), the self-driving vehicles which extricate human from driving offer the deduction of accidents, the assistance of disabled people, and the remission of congestion. To achieve this situation, there are another advantage provided by self-driving vehicles, the reduction of human errors which is the main causes traffic accidents. The increasing application of self-driving vehicles will bring the much safer and nicer world than before.

However, besides the benefits brought by self-driving vehicles, there are also some negatives and challenges following the changes. First and foremost issue is about responsibility. Although the accident rate is reduced by the self-driving techniques, it is rare to doubt that the traffic accidents cannot be entirely avoided. So here comes a question. If accidents happen, who will be responsible for this? The owners or the company who designs and develops the car? Just as the idea in Urmson’s article, self-driving vehicles do not need any operations from drivers, so the drivers and cars’ owners have enough reasons to say that they are irresponsible for the accidents. From the companies’ angles, the reasons of traffic accidents may not the designed problem, but the practical or some environmental problems causing the accidents. They all have enough reasons. Then, who will be responsible for the accident? Second, another problem is the density of self-driving cars. Actually, in the practical situation, there would not only the self-driving vehicles on the public road, but also the human-driving vehicles. There are some information from Urmson’s article that self-driving vehicles uses the system and data to forecast and judge other vehicles operations and determines their own actions. Yet not all of the driver would obey the basic rules, such as drunk drivers. So if self-driving vehicles’ operation just controlled by the electronic system, some situations cannot be exact forecast. It is possible that the accident rate is not declining but increasing.

With the development of advanced technologies and techniques, I believe that self-driving vehicles would make breakthrough and let human free from driving. If there are only self-driving cars on the road, it is absolutely a safer and higher efficient traffic environment. In this situation, I would like to recommend my families and friends about the self-driving vehicles. But if the environment is not so much safer, I will not recommend them to have a try.

Reference

Urmson, C. (2015). Progress in Self-Driving Vehicles. Spring Bridge: From the Frontiers of Engineering and Beyond, 45(1). Retrieved from www.nae.edu.

Thank you for reading.

Author: Liyuan Liu (Lyric)