Preparing for an Autonomous Future.
It’s 2018, look around autonomous stuff is everywhere, stranger than even imagined. Artificially Intelligent Robots, Self Driving vehicles, digital libraries, advanced bio-sciences all of this is now a reality. Just a mere decade ago most of us thought this would be impossible to achieve in such short period of time but yet we are surrounded with all of this .But are all of us really prepared for such drastic changes in our lives, will everyone be able to adapt to the autonomic future?
Let’s talk about some organizations which were able to achieve this.
Tesla is one of the leading companies when it comes to automation. In the last few years Tesla has been able to provide the world with remarkable technologies which changed the average mindset showcasing the power of all-electric vehicles. Along with that Tesla engineers have developed level 5 self driving capability at safety levels substantially higher than a human driver, Tesla’s autopilot is revolutionary, but it in still in beta and is not yet publicly released though Tesla cars have the hardware and the means to use it. The government of various countries are testing these fully self driving cars in live traffic, and not to much surprise many states in the US have already allowed the use of fully self driving vehicles like california, alabama, colorado etc. in total 29 states. and presumably by the year 2021 we will see many driver-less cars on road.
This all sounds very fantastic, but we still can’t rule out the possibility of road accidents be it due to computer error or human error, it’s still a loss of property and maybe even lives. These cars equipped with level 2 or level 3 autopilots have been involved in accidents, and it happened mostly when the drivers weren’t paying attention on the road ahead, one can say this was the driver’s error as he/she weren’t aware and level 2 -3 autopilots require the driver to be aware. UBER earlier this year were testing the self driving cars on the roads of Arizona, the car was a modified volvo XC90. Late night the car hit a 49 year old guy on a cycle, official investigation said the car decided to ‘Not Brake’ in that situation and ends up killing the pedestrian. This accident may have been the pedestrian’s fault but most people and media will blame the autopilot system itself because simply we are not ready yet to accept that a computer is smarter than a human.But still Autonomous vehicles are very intelligent, they are very safe definitely more safe than a human driver.
Autonomous vehicles promises a future with vehicles uninhabited by human errors, thus drastically improving safety and efficient navigation.Without the human error of speeding, illegal parking, road rage, drunk driving, the ticket generation will bound to plummet. The fuel or electric efficiency of vehicles will also improve, saving us both time and resources.
The new era of self-driving vehicles will be soon upon us and we will have to be prepared for changes of this magnitude. There will be some pains at first, but the end result will be good and very impactful on our behavior.