Editorial: Self-driving cars won’t catch on soon

It’s hard to pry yourself away from the really great television that’s offered nowadays —… It’s hard to pry yourself away from the really great television that’s offered nowadays — like “Jersey Shore.” But with new cars that drive themselves, an idea Google is curently testing, you won’t necessarily have to deprive yourself of that joy.

According to Mashable, Google’s automated vehicles would allow the driver to “be productive or entertained in the vehicle, doing work on a wireless Internet connection or watching television” instead of paying attention to the driving task. Yep, the car would allow you to fist pump with Snooki and The Situation while getting you to where you want to go.

If these artificial intelligence robot cars sound a little creepy to you, it’s probably because they are. Has Google not learned anything from the extremely conceivable film, “I, Robot?”

Just kidding. We try not to consider Will Smith movies to be past precedent.

The main purpose of the car is to increase safety by reducing traffic accidents. Google reports that its cars “use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to ‘see’ other traffic, as well as detailed maps to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.”

Although Google has been doing extensive test drives of the vehicles, we have to wonder if they’ll be approved to sell.  According to Mashable, “the most optimistic projections put this technology at least eight years away from market.”

In addition, the article notes that all current traffic laws assume that a human driver is present in the vehicle.

The only accident that has occurred so far was when one of the cars was rear-ended by a driver at a traffic light. Although this particular accident was the result of human error and not the fault of the Google car, we have to wonder if humans will still be at fault for accidents that might happen when a computer is operating the car.

If one of the purposes of an automated car is to allow the driver — well, passenger — to multitask during transportation, then we have to assume that the passenger isn’t paying much attention to passers-by. The computer is supposed to be able to react faster anyway, right? So are accidents then the fault of the passenger or of Google?

Finally, we feel it’s important to keep in mind that whereas humans are definitely more than capable of error while driving, technology is not currently foolproof. Computers crash and are hacked all the time. The problem with this is that, although we feel our lives revolve around our computers, if something happens to them, it’s not the end of the world. But if something happens to the computer that powers our car, it very well could be the end of our lives. A crash or a hack could send us off a bridge.

While an article in The New York Times states the engineers’ arguments for the benefits of robot cars, including “robot drivers [that] react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated,” the main flaw is that “to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today’s computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected.”

So while texting and driving without risk would be a pretty sweet deal, as humans, we at The Pitt News would like to maintain at least some sort of control in our lives by keeping control of our vehicles. After all, you never know when the robots will surpass us entirely and turn on us.