A recent 30-vehicle pileup on a highway near Hwaseong in South Korea has brought the dangers of automobiles back into the spotlight. While driverless cars are emerging as an alternative to reduce such accidents, the potential for accidents and the trauma caused by accidents are still a concern. Without addressing safety and trauma issues, commercialization of driverless cars may be premature.
In South Korea, a recent 30-vehicle pileup on a highway near Hwaseong that left more than a dozen people seriously injured has brought the dangers of autonomous vehicles into the spotlight. While many people overlook the dangers, traffic accidents are one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, claiming 1.25 million lives each year. Humans are fallible, and human-driven cars are unsafe. This is why driverless cars are being proposed as a solution.
Driverless cars are cars that are literally “unmanned,” meaning that they don’t have a human in the car at all. Until a few years ago, this technology was thought to be the stuff of science fiction movies like Star Trek’s autopilot. But with investments from global companies such as Google, Tesla, and Ford, driverless cars are no longer just science fiction. Chris Thompson, who leads Google’s driverless car development project, predicts that driverless cars will be available on the road within two to five years.
So, how do driverless cars judge complex road conditions and operate the car? A driverless car consists of a system that recognizes the environment around the vehicle, a system that determines the absolute position of the vehicle, a system that generates a path and speed to avoid obstacles, and a control system that estimates the speed along the generated path. Various sensors, such as cameras and laser scanners, are utilized as eyes to obtain accurate information about the surrounding environment. This information is then synthesized to find the optimal route and appropriate speed. This makes them more efficient and, in theory, safer because they don’t make the same mistakes that humans do, such as crossing the center line or being inattentive while driving.
However, even the most perfectly programmed driverless cars can’t completely avoid accidents. This is because their programs cannot fully predict human erratic behavior, let alone accidents caused by hacking. In fact, the first accident involving a driverless car occurred early last year during a test run of Google’s driverless car. The accident was caused by an incorrect prediction of the bus driver’s movements by the AI. The fact that the car was traveling at a speed of only 3 kilometers per hour at the time of the accident shows that concerns about driverless car accidents are not justified.
The use of driverless cars may not prevent accidents altogether, but it will certainly reduce the number of them. But is this the way to reduce traffic accidents? If we only count the number of accidents, then yes, but not if we consider the quality of accidents. The scary thing about car accidents is not so much the trauma they cause, but the damage they cause. While trauma can be recovered from to some extent, trauma is hard to overcome, with studies showing that being abused as a teenager remains traumatizing even 30 years later. In fact, even hearing words related to the accident can overactivate the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for negative emotions like anxiety. As a result, victims experience extreme anxiety even in everyday life that has nothing to do with the accident. The trauma of a driverless car accident is more severe than a typical accident. This has to do with basic human behavior. Humans tend to evaluate their own actions positively, so they defend against the effects of this trauma to some extent through a process of self-rationalization. However, when a person is involved in an accident with a driverless car, this defense mechanism does not work because the accident was caused by circumstances beyond their control. In fact, when accidents are similar in severity, PTSD is more severe after a disaster than after a typical car accident.
Trauma is also not limited to the victims. Recent evidence suggests a community impact of disaster trauma, in which people living in close proximity to an incident suffer from the trauma of the disaster. For example, depression rates nearly doubled in the neighborhoods near the Sewol ferry disaster, and mental health indicators were significantly lower than in other neighborhoods. These studies suggest that the trauma of driverless car accidents can have a negative impact on the emotional well-being of the entire society beyond the accident victims.
With Tesla, Google, and other companies already testing driverless cars, it’s safe to say that driverless cars are just around the corner. There is no doubt that the widespread use of driverless cars will bring many benefits, such as shorter travel times and a diversification of driving ages. However, it is also important to consider that the probability of accidents is higher than expected, and the trauma that victims go through in the event of an accident can affect the sentiment of society as a whole. Until these issues are addressed, the commercialization of driverless cars should be put on hold.
