Autonomous Vehicles

During the Autonomous Vehicles, I read and listened to different sources on negatives and positive effects that may result in the open use of Autonomous Vehicles in our country. First, I learned about A.I. and what it is. There are many different levels of A.I. varying from an extremely basic A.I. that does what it is programmed to and nothing more, then there is A.I. that is constantly learning from different situations and re-programming itself in order to improve itself. Different people have different situations on A.I., there are worries such as “What if we can’t control an A.I. that we create”. Although these are very valid worries they are also taken very seriously by the creators of these programs. Programmers have a very proactive approach when it comes to creating things such as A.I.. They don’t want to learn from their mistakes, they want to consider and fix the mistakes before anything is finished and released into the public.

This type of thought process is also used very carefully when creating Autonomous Vehicles. This type of careful consideration is absolutely necessary because of how dangerous it is to allow an Autonomous Vehicle that was not created with extreme care and may have some faults in its A.I. program. But thankfully, companies such as Google’s Waymo company have taken many years in producing and testing Autonomous Vehicle Technology. Waymo’s Autonomous vehicles have proven to be pretty safe, although not completely, they are constantly improving which is extremely promising for the future.

Other things I learned about would be the effect of having a society with Autonomous Vehicles. I think that roads would be much safer to drive on since cars would be more efficient drivers without the possibility of human error. Another effect would be the increasing comfort of a commute. People would be able to read or do work during their drive which would mean they would be much more willing to have much longer commutes. This means that more and more people could leave the city and live in suburbs or rural areas since they would be much more willing to drive. We have seen this once in history with the creation of the car, people began to move out of the city into outskirts or suburbs outside of the city, which is more comfortable living at the cost of distance. Another effect would be the decrease in the need for parking, all that parking land could become available and allow for bigger building or malls and such. These are all the considerations I had when learning this unit and all the interesting future possibilities that could occur due to autonomous vehicles.