Will driving cars be made illegal?
We live in a cutting-edge technological world right now. Most of the millennials are in favor of machines doing our work for us. The truth is who can blame us, if there is an easier, cheaper, and faster way to do something, who would say no to the offer?
However, even with the most tiring, stressful, and quite frankly dangerous work that we do, as humans, we have always been reluctant to let technology help do our work for us. It's an instinct, something is always on to us. Precisely why we don't trust robots, well at least most of us. Recently one of the most heated topics, a scary one at that, is the possibility of self-driven cars taking over the roads and human-driven cars being made illegal. As foreseers would see, probably by 2035.
Human-driven cars have always been a hazard to our economy irrespective of the measure of the advancement the nation is. As Naser Rader wrote in his book Unsafe At Any Speed; as long as they're still people in driving positions, we are always going to complain about road accidents. Statistically, 94% of road tragedies that, well, lead to deaths and permanent or temporary disabling conditions are caused by human error.
Just in the past year 1,350,000 of accidents are attributed to human error. This responsibility is equally shared by both car manufacturers and our dear self, the drivers behind the wheels. Thanks to drunk driving, sleep-driving, unauthorized driving, reckless driving... the list is as long as you can think of. All these have led to efforts by innovators and world manufactures to continuously touch up their game to make even safer cars.
From upgrading seat belts to the installation of a traffic monitoring system and now probably the biggest disruption of the century, self-driven cars.
Autonomous cars have been developed with the features such as adaptive cruise control that regulates the speed in relation to its real-time environment, autonomous emergency brake for an instant brake in event of a possible collision, blind spot detection for 360 coverage for active and passive blind spot coverage of the car, reverse parking assistant and vehicle to vehicle communication. In simple terms, all the resources needed to reduce the 94% of road accidents to close to 1% of road accidents. For a generation that still is skeptical about the speeds that technology is coming up with taking the world, that 1% still is a very scary number. However, in relation to 94%, I'd say let's take what we can get.
Holding that thought, does that mean that human-driven cars will not be allowed on the road. By not being allowed, the exact term is illegal. Will human-driven cars be illegal? Will autonomous cars be the only transportation allowed on the roads? What about cyclists? Will sporting activities involving humans being on the wheels no longer be a sporting activity, or rather a legal sporting activity? Just how fast and how real are we close to living this reality? Is this a reality bluff and we should just ignore the possibility of the apocalypse of autonomous cars?
What most of us can agree on is that self-drive cars are the best alternative to human-driven cars, but does that mean that human-driven cars will be made illegal? What is an eventuality that we cannot run away from is that autonomous cars are coming, fast in that matter, and the fact that that they offer a 99% reduction of road accidents makes it easier to think human-driven cars will be outlawed. For safety reasons
Well, human-driven cars will not be outlawed, need I mention this is just an opinion. Just like staircases were not outlawed when elevators came along, bicycles and horses when vehicles came along, boats and canoes when ships came along then, human-driven cars probably would not be entirely outlawed when autonomous cars take the roads. However, there will be restrictions.
Some of the restrictions include not driving beyond 15mph ( it is believed the probability of road accidents happening rises to 60% when the driving speed is beyond 15mph). Another anticipated rule is; the need to have a distinctive driving license, with a course and driving tests accompanying it. Finally, and this is a long shot, there will be roads set specifically for human-driven cars. Like how tracks are built with lanes for cyclists and pedestrians.
However, what is most likely guaranteed is human-driven public transportation, that is, buses, taxis etcetera, basically, mass means of transportation or rather public transportation with human drivers might be outlawed. Again for safety reasons. It will be more of a risk to put the lives of the public under the automotive control of another human being who is as well flawed. Human-driven public transport, yeah! That will probably be outlawed.