Pandora's Box? Perhaps...

I’ve written about driverless car technology in this blog before and I make no apologies for doing so again. I think it’s a fascinating topic. So do many other people and I interviewed one of them yesterday for an article in Vision Zero International, an automotive safety magazine which I contribute to. Bryan Reimer is a respected researcher at America’s MIT university, and believes getting the technology to work – that is having a car which can make its own decisions based on data from sensors – is the easy bit. He says the hard part is working out how humans are going to interact with the system and know when and when not to trust it. “There are enormous benefits but the consequences have yet to be understood,” he told me. Reimer also has concerns over motorists losing their driving skills, echoing exactly what has happened in the aviation industry. Pilots rely on autopilot too much and become ‘de-skilled’ – Reimer’s word, not mine. Then there’s the issue of what happens when a pedestrian gets knocked over and killed, which he says is inevitable. “To have autonomous vehicles we have to rewrite the liability books. Who is responsible – is it the driver? He’s going to say the car was supposed to stop. The car company? The supplier who produced the system?” Part of me thinks we’ve opened Pandora’s Box with autonomous cars.