Journal 6

Christ Urmson is head of engineering for Google’s self-driving car project. He wrote an article about ”Progress in Self-Driving Vehicles.” The self-driving vehicles project aims at diminishing accidents, helping people who cannot drive to get around, and lessening congestion. In my opinion, the initiation of technology is try to improve the living standard of all people; however, there are some problems might occur; such as, power shut down that probably would cause traffic congestion; solar wind emits irregular radiated wave, and it might affect the Global Positioning System. This unmanned car can lead inexperienced driver to an unknown place.

          The idea of helping people who cannot go round by themselves like young children and senior people is good. Take Taiwan for example. Parents are troubled because they have to drop and pick their children either to their nanny place, schools and cram schools. Rough estimation, it takes one and half hours for one child. In average, there are two children in every family that means parents are going to spend three hours on pick-and-drop children every day. With the invention of self-driving vehicles, it solves the problems for parents.

          About smooth the traffic jam, it’s really a great idea especially for people who communicates by cars because they don’t want to be late to their destination because of planning behavior software which helps to predict the behavior of other road users. Since self-driving vehicles claim that all it require from the driver is to tell the car where to go. This is awesome for people who have poor sense of direction. 

          Base on the previous reasons, I support the self-drive vehicles. Still, the two questions remain unanswered: what is power shut down completely? What if the GPS was affected by irregular radiated wave?