Self Driving Vehicles, and Why Driving Should Be Illegal

          Transportation has been around a long time. Even before the days of the automobile, people were riding horses and pulling wooden carraiges. Even with the introduction of GPSs, there has always been a common trend between transportation 2000 years ago and transportation in the twenty-first century; humans have been in control. For those not familiar with the concept of the movie, The Matrix, in the near future, robots will take over the world with AI. How, one might ask, does this relate to transportation? Well, in the near future, I hope that computers will run the world, making all driving controlled by computers. Its not a sci-fi movie concept either, it is happening now, and will come into play within my generation is gone. Welcome, to the world of self-driving cars.
          It all began about a decade ago, when trains were all driven by manual engineers, and relayed to different outposts to switch tracks and what-not to send a train in the right direction.

That was when it was devised to remove a lot of room for human error by building in a computer system that would automatically switch the tracks for them, creating less room for engineer-outpost communication error, sending a whole freight train in the wrong direction, slowing a delivery by hours or even days if the mistake were not realized soon. But the biggest difference between self-driving trains and self-driving cars is pretty evident: trains are on tracks, and cars are clustered together, sometimes bumper to bumper, turning left, changing lanes, and most importantly, free to roam on the roads, not barred by tracks. Before self-driving technology could reach cars, it would need an intermediate step, and that is where the tractors came along.
          In 2008, John Deere launched its self-driving tractor initiative, allowing tractors to be guided by GPS, and also record other data such as harvest yield, more accurate harvesting of rows, as well as log which areas are in need of insecticide. The main point though, was that not only were tractors were driving themselves, with the occasional need of a manual driver, but they were very smart and accurate about their driving, keeping within a 6 inch tolerance, so as not to wreck the crop driving over it. This took self-driving technology to new heights, leaving the railroad track behind.

            Google started the initiative in 2009 to begin their self driving car program, not because it was more efficient for fuel or because it was a convience, but because of the safety concern.

Generally, society is pretty unanimous in regards that murder is terrible, and last year in the US, 16,121 people are killed in homicides. Going along with this figure, 11,208 of these victims were killed with guns. However, how many people died from car crashes? 32,719 people happens to be the answer. So while people are concerned about gun safety, and politians wish to remove guns from society, polititians and others should think about making laws against human driving, because twice as many people die in preventable car crashes each year, and cars kill 3 times as many people as guns do, and that is why human driving should be illegal.

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