Self-guided cars: human skills are no longer necessary

In California, United States, the governor, Jerry Brown, just passed a law that will allow driverless cars (also called Autonomous Cars) to go around the city from 2015. But there have been trials in the streets of California where it has been proven that these cars can go by themselves without much of a problem. In fact, over 300,000 miles these cars have driven and only one accident ocurred, caused by a human-controlled car.

In the ceremony where this passing law was being celebrated, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, announced that there are plans to sell these cars in five years, claiming that they would be much safer than human-controlled cars. He also said that these cars would save thousands of people that are injured or killed every year in car accidents, because drivers are not well-prepared or are inefficient. Besides, these vehicles could reduce the areas of parking since they could be parked in parts where humans could not get into.

The issue states when you realize that these machines that were always thought to need a human to be controlled, engineers have demonstrated that with a good software and sensors, a machine can perform a sophisticated task without the help of humans. And now people are starting to worry about their jobs. Maybe in ten years: What will happen to all the people who work driving public transportation? Companies claim that with the development of their business, they buy equipment and hire workers, but some others claim that this is not happening.

In your opinion, will it be a new Industrial Revolution in the future? Will many human-needed tasks be upstaged by the outstanding performance of machines?