Autonomous Driving: The biggest fears
Fully self-driving vehicles still seem way off into the future for most people. The idea of distant utopias of autonomous systems everywhere we turn can be frightening, from one-wheeled robots delivering our Friday night takeaways to having conversations with AI-powered housemaids as we get in from a long day at work.
But how far into the future is it? Not as far as you might think.
Just like the Space Race of the mid-20th century, tech giants such as Google (Waymo), Amazon (Zoox) and Tesla are competing against each other to launch the first level 5* autonomous vehicle. But whoever wins that race, ultimately, must win the acceptance of the general public.
What are the biggest fears?
Expecting a machine to act human.
Of course, there is an encyclopedia of challenges when it comes to autonomous vehicles and not just from a technology standpoint. Even if the first fully self-driving vehicle was produced and put on the market tomorrow, no one can tell what the reaction from everyday people will be.
Morally speaking, putting your life in the hands of a machine is an incredibly daunting thought. How safe is safe? A machine will need the capability to think like a human, to react like a human and to learn like a human, which is another daunting thought, we’ve all seen iRobot, right?!
Cyber-carjackers. (They shall now be called cy-jackers!)
These vehicles will fully operate in the cloud, processing lots of information throughout every journey. Sensory devices such as LiDAR, Radar, video cameras and thermal imaging are collecting tons of data every second for the vehicles to operate. But this opens up an opportunity to the not-so-ethical hackers out there, and depending on their MO, who knows what they could do? They could lie there in wait, listening in to conversations or working out our everyday journeys. Even worse, the more dangerous hackers could potentially manipulate the sensors and systems, causing all kinds of havoc on the roads for drivers and pedestrians.
Our perspective
There are understandably major concerns within the space, but with the biggest concerns comes an even bigger opportunity. The list of job opportunities within autonomous driving is as long as my mother’s shopping order after a long break in Spain (and that’s long!)
The need to hire skilled people has never been bigger. To tackle the hackers, we will need the best cyber-security experts. To make the car think like us, we will need super-intelligent perception engineers. To ensure the safety of the vehicles, we will need the best testing facilities.
From an educational perspective, the boom in autonomous driving and AI systems will redesign our university curriculums, creating more and more cutting-edge developers and engineers ready for the future.
In my opinion, the advancement of autonomous driving is really exciting and not to be feared – there will always be problems to overcome, but we have the power and intelligence to make the future, happen now.
At Adapt Talent we specialize in recruitment within the autonomous driving and artificial intelligence industry, contact us today for all of your staffing needs.
