Autonomous Cars- Good or Bad??

In the past weeks, my knowledge of Artifical Intelligence and Autonomous Cars have grown susbstainly. In the previous weeks we have discussed what makes Autonomous Cars, essentially Autonomous, and it all has to do with Artifical Intelligence. Artifical Intelligence is just as it sounds, artifical meaning fake and intelligence meaning knowledge, this can typically be used in robots that can do human functions, such as vaccum a floor, make an alcoholic drink, and what were talking about, driving cars. The most popular self driving cars out right now are the Teslas, where essentially the hardware and computer in the car allows it to drive itself while you play a game on sterio part of the car or do your makeup while your car drive itself, parks itself, and if your at the mall and don’t want to walk in the rain it will pick you up. All of this sounds amazing right? Of course, the coolest features are talked about when promoting these autonomous cars, but what they don’t discuss is how safe these actually are? How safe is it to allow a computer to drive for you? In the Self-Driving Statistics by Raj Vardhman, he mentions “The self-driving Tesla Model S caused a pedestrian fatality in Florida in April 2019,” (Vardhman, 2020), This just goes to show that self-driving cars can’t be completely trusted because this one caused the death of an innocent pedestrian. Over the past few weeks, I have learned and formed a strong opinion on how I don’t believe these autonomous cars to be safe. With the addition from one of the past readings, it really made me believe that there’s no way these can be safe. AI has a long way to come before I will buy a self driving car, I just can’t simply understand how a computer can drive a car. It kinda surprised me to see what my classmates said in our discussion of how many believed these should be allowed on the roads, I respect their opinion and could see their side, but I’m also so set in my opinion. I think its great that technology has grown enough to allow for computer and robots to do and control these things in our lives, but I don’t think its something we should rely on as it can always have updates and improvements made to them. I hope this was informative and enough to leave you to form your own opinion on autonomous cars and whether they are safe enough to be on the road or not?