Driverless vehicles may not be all they're cracked up to be. Indeed, they may be harmful to our collective security and well-being.
Unless you've been vacationing on Saturn, you know that driverless vehicles are the next Big Thing. Almost every major car company (General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes) has a program, often in cooperation with tech firms. A few of those, Google being a prominent example, have their own prototypes. In a recent study, Navigant Research — a consulting firm — counted 18 projects.
To be sure, the appeal of driverless cars is powerful. In 2015, 35,092 people died in road accidents nationwide, says the Transportation Department. It attributed more than 90 percent of the crashes “to human choice or error.” If these people had been riding in driverless cars, many of these accidents would not have occurred, the argument goes. The hazards of drinking, texting, speeding and other driving dangers would have been sharply reduced.
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