It’s a 2’o clock in the afternoon. Suddenly, you have a strong urge to eat donut. You open the Google Assistant & say, “Hey Google, Order donuts from nearest ‘Dunkin Donuts’.” After few minutes, Google’s Self Driving car: ‘Waymo’ comes to your home with cupcakes in it. Again you say “Hey Google, Let’s go to Grandma’s home” You sit inside the Waymo & travel to your grandma’s house. Wait. Does it sound weird? Yes. It really does. But it’s soon gonna be one of the incidences of self-driving cars of the future & they are really gonna change our life.
Big giants including Google, Apple, Tesla, Ford, Mercedez, BMW are working on building the autonomous cars or self-driving cars of the future.
How Will Self Driving Cars Impact Society Positively?
1. Less Need To Buy A Car:
As you know, buying a car creates a deep hole in your pocket and since, Uber is also getting into self driving car business, you’ll use such travel apps as usual but with ‘driverless cars’. I was recently looking reviews of latest Ford models on CARHP. Even Ford announced Autonomous 2021 program to introduce driverless autonomous cars in the market.
2. More Transparent, Safer Deliveries:
When was the last time you’ve taken your Amazon Order from that delivery boy? Remember, these delivery boys may be out of their jobs in future. Even though top e-commerce companies take special care for delivering the order without any malfunction, there is always a possiblity. By introducing self driving autonomous cars & drones, this risk can be reduced further.
3. New Employment
Economic Impact Of Self Driving Cars will be positive since it will create lot of new opportunities. Though self driving cars don’t need a dedicated driver, still it needs highly talented team of engineers, scientists, technicians to build and manage highly complex systems. These kind of people are going to be in huge demand in future. Even Udacity has introduced Self Driving Car Nanodegree for those who are willing to work in this field.
4. Mobile Office
This may sound little bit over now but this thing will be completely possible in future. You know about those mobile food courts but normal office work can also be done in the self driving vehicles if they are modified and built specifically for that purpose. The activities like meetings can be conducted smoothly in self driving vehicles.
5. Less Deaths More Lives
On an average, ne person is killed every 25 seconds due to road accidents in the world means more than 1.25 million deaths are traffic related. Since, most of them are due to human error, the number of deaths can be reduced significantly because Artificial Intelligence will be controlling the car.
6. Earth Will Be Greener
Due to computation, the fuel efficiency will be higher in self driving cars which will create less pollution. If the car becomes electric then there will be significant reduction in air pollution which will reduce global warming & make the mother earth happy 😀
How Self Driving Cars Will Change The World With Shocking Risks?
1. Increase In Unemployment
Here, I’m not only talking about the drivers. But autonomous cars will transform whole automobile industry. Lot of manual jobs are going to be automated and will be done by machines. For example, in case of self driving buses, there may not be the role of conductor too. Because, users can directly make the payment via phone. Hence, the salary of 2 employees: Driver & Conductor can be saved at a time. This was the Economic Impact Of Self Driving Cars.
2. Eagle Eye
If you have seen the movie Eagle Eye, one central computer is controlling whole city. It can spy on anyone. In this case, since, the self driving cars have strong ability to capture data due to various sensors, camera, they can be used as a spying device too resulting in threatening the privacy of the users.
3. Centralization
Since, the self driving cars will be always connected to internet and controlled by respective company, they have complete control on them. The respective company can start/ stop the car anytime, anywhere which may lead to some unethical practices.
4. What The Hack?
Hacking can be serious problem in case of autonomous vehicles. Since they can be controlled remotely, the network intrusion may lead to serious damage which may cause serious disasters. Securing the Self Driving car is going to be one of the highest priority jobs out there.
Change is Inevitable
It’s clear that Self Driving Cars Are The Wave Of The Future and has lot of benefits. But, it also has few cons. To overcome the centralization problem, the blockchain technology can be used and the final decision making process can be decentralized in case of important tasks. Even in case of powering the car and recovering the fuel & costs, the Cryptocurrency mining systems can be fixed in car so that the car will be self funded machine. Change is Inevitable that’s why future is awesome 🙂