Forgive the duckbeary sensationalism in the title. I was wondering what everyone's opinion on self driving cars is? Aside from my machismo coming to surface, (give me a clutch and a 6-speed H-gate for the rest of my life, please), I'm actually extremely concerned about losing the human element to safe driving and decision making.
Yes, it's true that 99.9% of all accidents are caused by human error (either not paying attention, underestimating distance needed to brake in relation to momentum and weight, underestimating weather effects on traction even in an AWD car, etc etc etc.) but there are certain situations where computer failure would lead to extremely deadly accidents. A human knows not to drive a car off of a bridge, or not to change lanes if you can physically see another car (provided they aren't in a blind spot). But what if the sensors fail, and give bad feedback? There would obviously be fail-safes in place for all kinds of sensor failures, but what if they failed "just enough" to not be "off" but simply tell it bad data? And the car suddenly decides it's going to go over a bridge? I have worked on cars long enough to know that all kinds of funny things happen with computers and sensors. Of course a self driving car has a FAR more sophisticated set up of sensors and feedback than just a simple O2 sensor for example, but if your O2 sensor is bad, your car might stay in open loop and run a little lean or rich. If a self-driving decides it's going to ram the whole vehicle 50MPH into another vehicle and kill somebody's kid...
I don't like it. Call me old, but I don't like the idea at all.
Hoppe hoppe Reiter, und kein Engel steigt herab
mein Herz schlagt nicht mehr weiter, NUR DER REGEN WEINT AM GRAB