Robot rides may force error-prone human motorists off the road
New rules of the road for robot cars coming out of Washington this week could lead to the eventual extinction of one of the defining archetypes of the past century: the human driver.
While banning people from driving may seem like something from a Kurt Vonnegut short story, it’s the logical endgame of a technology that could dramatically reduce -- or even eliminate -- the 1.25 million road deaths a year globally. Human error is the cause of 94 percent of roadway fatalities, U.S. safety regulators say, and robot drivers never get drunk, sleepy or distracted...
With mobile devices an added distraction, U.S. highway fatalities rose 8 percent last year, the biggest increase in 50 years. Some 38,300 people were killed on the road in 2015 and 4.4 million were seriously injured, according to the National Safety Council. Globally, 1.25 million people die in car crashes annually, according to the World Health Organization.
“Behind the wheel, we are only human and we are expected to screw up,” said Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab in Pittsburgh. “There will come a point in time where we should not be allowed to drive.”...