Drivers vs. The Car
Why Self-Driving Cars Aren’t the Solution To All Of Our Problems
By Jessica F.
The news is everywhere- self-driving cars are zooming down the path to completion, and they’re not slowing down anytime soon. Google is currently developing and testing a smart car, and many other companies offer self-driving features such as self-parking and automatic breaking. Though these smart cars may never fall asleep at the wheel or get distracted by a text from their best friend, they still come with dangers of their own. Smart cars, no matter how powerful the technology used, still have the potential to be hacked, and if hacked on a major highway a vehicle could easily become a weapon of mass destruction, resulting in major pileups that leave people killed. In addition to this, a recent study by NPR shows that in 29 out of the 50 American states, truck driving is the most common full-time job. Should computers be employed instead of human beings sometime in the future, many Americans would lose their jobs and find themselves on the unemployed list. In short, self-driving cars have flaws in the fact that they could both be potentially hacked, and could, once perfected, easily replace Americans in the market for driving jobs.
Major hackings have been constantly on the news recently- many major companies, such as Target and Lowes, have had their systems hacked into, leaking countless amounts of customer information. In addition to this, it has also been shown on the news that the director of the CIA had his personal email account hacked by a teenager. If a person under the age of 18 can hack into the email account of the CIA director, then who is to say that an experienced hacker would not have the ability to take control of a completely computer-run car? If such a hacker did so with malicious intent, then the results would be catastrophic, possibly causing the deaths of many innocent people. In addition to this, it is important to note that no matter how much security is added to these cars, it will never be enough, as hackers grow stronger each and every day, like a virus, and those working in computer security simply do not have the ability to develop a 'vaccine' to stop their invasion.