Annie (Jing) Zheng_DAfinal

tradingcard tradingcardback1

With the ever growing technological advances happening in the world today, it has become inevitable to ignore the power of technology. With technology, we sometimes tend to request advances that our technology cannot yet create. Take for example the Hover board. Our technology isn’t advanced enough to create an actual Hover board like the one in “Back to the Future” but there has been attempts by Lexus to create a board that hover a few centimeters above a magnetic field.  Another popular request is flying cars. Our technology cannot create flying cars for the general public just yet, however, our technology is advanced enough to the point to create self driving cars. Self driving cars are more likely to be ingrained in our society 20 years from now than flying cars, especially with the advances that Google has made so far.

Google has been recently pushing out their self driving cars , succeeding to convince the Federal Government that their cars are legal drivers. While some companies like Mercedes, Tesla and BMW already have implement some self driving abilities in their higher end cars, Google’s aims to completely eliminate human aspect and error that is usually related in car accidents. These cars uses highly advanced technological systems to track and map their “view” in order to drive safely. However, it is still technology that is capable of malfunctioning or getting hacked. In addition, with such a great reliance on the self driving technology, it gives us more opportunity to become distracted in the car. With a self driving car, the need to pay attention to the road will decrease, which can be potentially dangerous if the system malfunctions and the passenger is aloof about the situation.

Google announced that by 2020, there will be self driving cars ready for the general public.. If that actually happens, then it is likely that by 2030, every road will be filled with self driving cars to the point that even public transportation would be done with the self driving cars. Perhaps in the future, instead of hailing a cab, we would be able to hail  a google car through an app similar to Uber. Or maybe the success of the self driving car would allow us to travel to places while sleeping on the go. But then again, that could be dangerous. What if the autonomous system malfunctions and cause an accident while the passenger is napping? What if the passenger becomes too  engrossed with Candy Crush and fails to notice that the car has detoured off into a dangerous cliff until the last second? It would be too late wouldn’t it?  However, no matter whatever concerns there are today about self driving cars, they will become inevitable in the future.