Society set for head-on collision with driverless cars

said braka 7:21 AM
But the  also threatens millions of jobs

and raises a slew of ethical dilemmas—prospects that were on the minds of business chiefs and politicians meeting at the World Economic Forum this week.
"Companies are going to have to start thinking about it, governments are going to have to start thinking about it," said Missy Cummings, the director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University in North Carolina.
"The reality is we can't just keep our head in the sand like an ostrich," she told AFP in Davos, singling out the coming impact on employment.
In the United States alone, an estimated four million people work as truckers, taxi drivers and in other jobs that are under threat when the driverless vehicles come into widespread use—a matter of years, experts predict.
In October, delivery drivers got an uncomfortable glimpse of the future when a self-driving truck built by Uber's Otto unit successfully delivered a beer shipment.
New game, new players
Cars with some autonomous functions—such as the ability to adjust the speed—are already on our roads, and more than a dozen automakers including BMW, Kia, Volkswagen and General Motors are racing to get fully self-driving cars to market by 2020.
Champions of the technology point to its potential to reduce the 1.3 million road deaths worldwide each year—too many of them at the hands of a tired or distracted driver, or one who simply did not react fast enough.
The auto industry is already changing fast thanks to the advent of services like Uber and electric vehicles, and carmakers are eyeing both the threats and opportunities.
Renault-Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn summed up the transformations as a "reshuffling of the cards" for the industry.
"There is a new game, let's see who is going to be able to prevail," he told an audience in Davos.
The dash for driverless technology is bringing new players into the car business, notably Google, Apple and BlackBerry.
The disruption will create jobs too—engineering posts and roles in any number of new services. There is talk of mobile doctors' surgeries and moving nail salons.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-society-head-on-collision-driverless-cars.html#jCp