Driverless Cars: Contemporary Issues in Information and Technology

This article discusses the development, capabilities, and issues surrounding driverless cars, including safety, ethical concerns, and privacy. It also explores the suitability of this technology in different markets.

CONTEMPRORARY
ISSUES IN
INFORMATION
AND
TECHNOLOGY
DRIVERLESS CARS

1
Innovation has been a part and parcel of the modern day technology. Various researches have
been conducted on making things work automatically. Driverless cars are one of the most
awaited products of this type (Thierer and Hagemann, 2015). With the development of IOT
networks, this concept has somewhat became reality. The smarter machines are the part of
future which makes machines less dependent on humans for performing their task. Several
bigger IT firms like Apple, Google, Uber and many more are working on it to make it
available for the general purpose use. Uber has the plan to replace 20% of its cars by
driverless cars by 2019. Many companies have partially developed the technologies that will
be used within the cars like automatic gears, steering, horns etc. but a full-fledged use of all
this technology at once is still a challenge.
Driverless cars are capable of sensing obstacles and at the same time they are able to navigate
through larger distance. This is an innovation that will change the lives of disabled people.
There are various sensors attached with the car that is capable of sensing the environment.
The decisions about the actions are taken on the basis of data evaluation (Knight, 2013).
There is use of GPS system that supports its navigation purpose. It automatically reaches to
the set destinations. Its ability to visualise object can be achieved by analysing the data based
on millions of miles of drivers. It uses the concept of machine learning where it learns from
the data collected in the past. Radars can be used for analysing the moving as well as still
objects. There is a problems with the cars that if the fault is from someone other who himself
drives the car then avoiding accidents may not be possible.
There are several issues attached with development of Driverless cars. The first and the basic
issue is that it might lead to accident at the testing level and its ability to differentiate between
various objects is still a question (Hicks and Fitzsimmons, 2018). Apart from this there is
ethical issue regarding how the cars will be able to identify other animals apart from the
person. Since the technology will be attached with the bigger networks like IOT and Cloud
computing hence the security and privacy issues always comes in the way. With the
increasing hacking activities there is a chance that cars could get hacked and may lead to
some kind of accidents or some mishaps (McBride, 2016). Along with this there is a clause of
privacy because there are large amount of data that gets stored with these system. If the
systems access goes into some wrong hand there could be chance of stealing of privacy data
related to owners and others.

2
Apart from all this its suitability according to different markets is also an issue. This can be
understood by the fact that in the countries such as India where the road width and traffic
ratio is on the higher side, this concept may be a failure as traffic jams and rash driving are
very common at the crowded places.

3
REFERENCES
Thierer, A. and Hagemann, R., (2015) Removing roadblocks to intelligent vehicles and
driverless cars. Wake Forest JL & Pol'y, 5, p.339.
Knight, W., (2013) Driverless cars. Technology Review, 116(6), pp.44-49.
McBride, N., (2016) The ethics of driverless cars. ACM SIGCAS Computers and
Society, 45(3), pp.179-184.
Hicks, M. and Fitzsimmons, M., (2018) Driverless cars explained: everything you need to
know about the futuristic tech. [Online]. Available at:
https://www.techradar.com/news/driverless-cars-explained. [Accessed on 29 July 2018].