Journal #6

   Nowadays there is a heating debate about whether or not we should develop self-driving vehicles, some people agree with that it is beneficial for us, while others think it can bring some problems. In Chris Urmson’s article, he listed some ideas about why the self-driving vehicles are important for the future.

   The first is, as a society we need to do a much better job at protecting road users. So if you look at worldwide statistics, there’s 1.2 million road users who are killed per year. Around 40 percent of that number is pedestrians and cyclists. So yes, there’s an awful lot of room for improvement there, just generically.

   Second, we know this is a new technology we’re bringing into the world and we want to do it as safely as possible. So we took it upon ourselves to think about how can we have an independent layer of safety for people out there in the community. We’re going to do everything we can to design the software and hardware to never fail, but should it fail or should someone step out in the road at a distance where they couldn’t take an evasive action, we want to reduce the impact.

  As for the drawback of this technology, I think the main dangerous thing is that it can be made use of by terrorists for some terrible things, for example, terrorists can put bombs in one self-driving car without any drivers, so by this they have no people loss, and then let their cars go to somewhere they want to destroy. This is an important issue that we must consider.

  In my opinion, I think only if the technology is being mature , I will drive these automated vehicles. Since I think if this technology is not fully developed, there are still some potential danger in it.