Autonomous Cars: Challenges and Perspectives

One of the most promising and potentially disruptive technologies of our decade is that of autonomous cars, or self-driving cars. News regarding innovations, ethical dilemmas or even the first accidents involving autonomous cars have taken over specialized media. Gartner Inc., a consulting company focused on information technology that develops yearly reports on new technological trends, currently places autonomous cars at the peak of their hype chart for emerging innovations. 
An autonomous car is a vehicle capable of identifying the environment around and navigate it without any human input. Although the first experiments involving autonomous cars began late in the 80’s, it was only in the 2010’s that investments on the technology really skyrocketed, boosted by new developments navigation systems, sensors and Internet access.
Autonomous cars are held as a bearers of a great potential to reduce road accidents and traffic jams and to increase the access to individualized transportation to lower classes, elderly people and children. Combined with other emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things and Blockchain, autonomous cars little by little reveal themselves as a great promise for the sharing economy and for the new economy.

The technology also brings with it challenges. Regulatory, safety and algorithm accountability issues are among the most often mentioned. As well as on most sectors possibly affected by Artificial Intelligence, there is a persistent concern regarding the impact of autonomous cars on jobs and the job market: the transportation sector is among the top employing in Brazil and in the whole world, and economic pressure for human employees to be replaced by automations is enormous.

Legislation

There’s no current legislation in Brazil that deals specifically with autonomous cars, and the existing legislation regarding traditional traffic norms leaves doubts and controversy regarding the legitimacy of such an innovation. Article 28 of the Brazilian Traffic Code states, for instance, that “the driver shall, on every moment, have control over his/her vehicle […]”. The interpretation of the provision and its implications to the legitimacy of self driving cars in Brazil must be discussed with greater depth and the possibility of a legislative reform or of a specific legislation must not be discarded.
However, one alternative is the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, of which Brazil is a signatory, and which contains international rules and standards for road traffic. The Convention has just received a new amendment that allows for the use of autonomous driving technologies, besides eliminating previous restrictions to autopilot systems on higher speeds. A deeper analysis must be made.
In the United States, the State of Nevada was the first to have its own legislation specifically directed to the regulation of autonomous cars. The states of California, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, Washington, Tennessee and the District of Columbia followed. The American Department of Transportation has also issued technical rules and standards of safety that helped achieve further legal certainty and avoid hindering innovation on the sector.

The pioneering legislation of Nevada draws attention for the definitions it adopted and for the requirement of a specific license to the use of autonomous cars. The law describes autonomous cars as: “[…]a motor vehicle that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator.” and defines Artificial Intelligence as “[…] means the use of computers and related equipment to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic the behavior of human beings”. It also establishes that the use of an autonomous car depends on a specific endorsement by the Department of Transportation to the operator’s driver’s license. A doubt remains, then, if under current legislation a child or person without a license would be allowed to operate it.

Following American states, the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland and Singapore have all adopted specific legislations to allow for the use and test of autonomous cars in their territories. The latter intends to begin tests for an autonomous taxi system as early as 2017.

Challenges and Dilemmas of Autonomous Cars

The advent of autonomous car technology brought with it patent ethical dilemmas, specially in what concerns moral, criminal or material liability for eventual accidents. One of the most famous involves the decision which an autonomous car must be programmed to take in an eventual context where accident is inevitable: should it favor the life people inside them or of those outside?
The moral and philosophical questions involved are virtually endless, mainly for dealing with a very specific and even highly unlikely scenario. The main virtue of autonomous cars lies on them not running into the same accidents and mistakes human drivers do such as individualist driving, slow reflexes, violation of safety rules, sleepyness and drunkeness. Some autonomous cars, such as Tesla Motors’, have proved they are able not only to avoid but also to foresee accidents before they even happen, so as to take the necessary precautions to prevent them with a such a speed human reflexes would never be able to match.
Any moral decisions, however, don’t have to be made by the car maker or by the software developer: they might be directed towards the final consumer, who would opt for one or another choice in a pre-setting of the vehicle before first running it. The creation of mandatory insurance as material remedies for cases like this have also been proposed.
Another significant concern lies upon the security of the vehicles. Just like with the Internet of Things, automous cars create new possibilities for crimes and other malicious acts through invastion and compromise of its systems. The vulnerability of these systems, caused by negligence during the architectural structuring of the software, has often been mentioned. Experiments with non-autonomous cars but which possess some degree of cybernetic control and are somehow connected to the Internet have already made evident the potential harm caused by malicious agents capable of infiltration.

Another significant concern is with the impact of autonomous cars on the labor market. In Brazil, the transportation sector employs over 4 million workers, nearly 5% of all workers in the country. The ample adoption of automation technologies may from one day to the other give birth to waves of unemployed workers, causing huge impacts in social stability and on the labor market that are impossible to foresee or maye even prevent.

Conclusion

Regulatory, ethical and social challenges of artificial intelligence, and not only its benefits, will be at the center of attention in the next decade. Autonomous cars will be at the vanguard of this new field of technology and of the disruptive impact it may cause. The role of the regulator is vital not only to mitigate damages but also to guarantee that innovation is not hindered by unnecessary legal limitations. Discussion on public policy for autonomous cars must be ruled by permissionless innovation and ex post regulation.