In this unit, we discussed the benefits and drawbacks of autonomous vehicles. I think right now AI driven cars are pretty well accepted in our society, the only thing we do not trust at the moment is cars with no steering wheel at all- no failsafe, so to speak. I think its interesting that we put so much trust in the driver in this scenario when 94% of all road accidents are due to human error, so much for saving the day huh (Vardhman)? I think it would be interesting to see how AI driven cars would do if potentially all cars on the road were AI driven, would they be able to talk to each to determine the fastest route for all? At what point would that become a glorified, expensive, gas guzzling, public transport system?
One thing I never really considered before this module was the impact AI cars would have on the constuction in our environment. We never really think about it at this stage, but the way it would affect how cities and suburbs are built is very interesting. The wasted space of parking lots was especially interesting, but it also made me wonder; more AI cars means less spaces are needed but the cars would surly still need to be parked somewhere (Larco)? They say malls would need less parking lot space, so your car drops you off at the mall and then what? Would it just drive around until you need to go home? The cars themselves still exist in the same capcity they did before, they just don’t need human intervention to get from point A to point B.
I was surprised that the topic of ethical crashing never came up in this unit- say an AI car is going to crash matter what- it has to make a choice on where. Does it protect the driver first, or the innocent pedestrian? What if the car has 5 passengers and the only way to protect them is to divert the path into a couple of innocent onlookers? Whose life has more weight? An AI has to be trained to make these decisions, so this blood would be on whose hands? This is essentially a real world trolly problem, people talk about the accidents AI cars have gotten into- but this is seldom discussed.
AI vehicles are a super interesting topic, some people even think the AI will soon outmatch our own intelligence- and yet the same people do not trust it to keep the steering wheel straight. AI itself is not independently smart, it is only as good as its manufacturers, and I think its these people we must be able to trust, not just the code- but the people who wrote it.
