Self Driving Cars

The most important obstacle for wide adoption of self-driving cars is trust. Like nuclear energy, self-driving cars will be forever stigmatized if a single gruesome, highly publicized incident occurs. People feel a sense of control when they drive. They feel like they can always react to what other drivers are doing. Self-driving cars will necessarily give up this form of control, leading to some accidents that would be preventable if a person was driving. It is not surprising that 56% of people polled in a 2017 PEW survey said they would not want to ride in a self-driving car, and 72% of those said that their reasoning is due to safety concerns and lack of trust. The technology in self-driving cars requires hundreds of machine learning, computer vision, and robotics experts to develop. However trust, not technology, will be the primary factor in whether they become the crown jewel in an automated Second Industrial Revolution, or whether they go the way of Google Glass.