Persuasive Essay On Autonomous Driving

Autonomous cars may seem like a convenient but unnecessary technology. However, they are absolutely crucial to modern day society. Every year, 1.2 million lives are taken by traffic crashes around the world. Of these crashes, 94% of them involve human error. A daily driver is surrounded by other drivers who pose a constant threat to his safety. People who are distracted by their phones, their passengers, or take their eyes off the road pose a serious threat to other drivers. There are no amount of laws or regulations that can remedy this problem. One basically has to accept that if there are human drivers, there will be distracted drivers. However, autonomous cars can definitely ameliorate the dire condition that driving is in currently. Autonomous …show more content…
In addition, self-driving cars provide the ability for otherwise handicapped or elderly people an easy means of transportation. In fact, in 2015, Waymo’s first driverless ride on public roads transported Steven Mahan, a legally blind man who is the former CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center. Because of the many benefits that autonomous vehicles provide, it would be unethical to not further the research and development of such cars. In Tobias Holstein, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, and Patrizio Pelliccione’s paper, Ethical and Social Aspects of Self-Driving Cars, they raise important ethical questions about autonomous vehicles. Holstein stresses that people should be concerned more about concrete real-world engineering problems rather than hypothetical idealized “trolley” problems. Holstein says, “While an ethical dilemma is an idealized constructed state that has no good solution, an engineering problem is always by construction such that it can differentiate between better and worse solutions” (Holdstein, 2). Arguing about abstract thought experiments is not helpful to the development of autonomous vehicles. Instead, concrete conditions that directly impact the behavior of self-driving cars, one’s