The problem with Google's Cars that drive themselves

Have you ever fantasized about something your whole life and somewhere in the back of your mind it says something like "this fantasy won't be this good in reality". Well, a car that drives itself I believe will be like that too. Anything in life that appears just too good to be true usually is. That is almost always a given in life. I think that is a very good starting point for where I'm trying to go with this.

So, Artificial intelligence in a car might be like having your Oui or PS3 drive your car. Are you ready for that? Really? If you are over 12 years old and you want that then I'm a little worried about your judgement as an adult or young adult.

So let me give you a list of things that I can see right off that could go wrong just right off the bat. First of all, artificial intelligence can only respond to things it recognizes as problems. So, for example, because it is under 1 foot in height it might run over a cat or small dog and not recognize this as a problem but more like a moving leaf or blowing branch from a tree or paper bag instead. That is not to say that drivers constantly don't drive over living things when they are not aware of them or when they are just going too fast to avoid them. It's just that a living driver (if he or she sees something) is more likely to avoid any living thing in the roadway if the driver safely can.

Or, with artificial intelligence the opposite might happen. Let's say an artificially driven car is barreling down a freeway at 70 miles per hour. The truck in front of it hits a bump and off comes a refrigerator size box. Now, to a computer program this box might appear to be any weight up to a ton. But for you the driver, you saw how it flew through the air and caught the wind. So you know it had to be empty. So you just might drive straight through it on the passenger side of the car because you are in the 2nd lane of a fully moving full 70 mph 4 lane freeway heading down the road and you know that to move to the side into another full lane will cause an accident. But the artificially driven car might not know that this is empty and may assume because of its size that to hit it would be fatal and might just push another car out of the way on another lane because it might know to stop to suddenly might whiplash all the passengers in its car and possibly kill a human driver and his occupants behind because a computers reflexes are about 1000 to 1,000,000 times faster than any human driver.

So as an experienced driver you or I might choose to hit this obviously empty refrigerator box on the passenger side of the car and just keep going and be okay. But since there are so many UNDEFINED VARIABLES to a computer program almost any outcome might happen instead when that artificially driven car hit this bad situation.

Though I could go on and on you get the basic problem with artificial intelligence.

Next, let's address criminal hackers or terrorists in the mix.

What's to stop any terrorist from stealing and using any artificial intelligence vehicle (air, land or sea or space) and programming it to do whatever they want? All they need is access physically and software wise to accomplish whatever is on their minds?

In fact, since the technology existed on passenger airliners in 2001, I often have wondered whether anyone at all was on those planes when they hit the World Trade Center? In other words it was possible to take off and land many passenger planes from the ground at that time. They are just better at it now. This technology was in place in case the pilot, and co-pilot died or got sick or the whole interior airliner decompressed violently so it could be landed from the ground remotely. So it was possible even then in 2001.

So, imagine a car that one could order to drive anywhere. So, this car might be programmed to go to a garage somewhere. Then a dead body with sunglasses on, or just a dead body at night could be set at the wheel so it looked like a live person, and it could be driven anywhere with a bomb, or just machine guns placed inside along the sides of the vehicle to rake the streets anywhere there are roads on earth. This isn't science fiction anymore. This is now possible! So, since it is now possible laws must be enacted to protect us or lots of us will just be killed in new ways over the next few hundred years until laws are enacted to protect civilians everywhere from this kind of thing.