https://abcnews.go.com/Business/ups-joins-race-future-delivery-services-investing-driving/story?id=65014414
Picture from ABC's article on autonomous trucks
Autonomous trucks
One of the most interesting class discussions I remember us having was when we talked about autonomous trucks. I had always heard about self driven cars however I never thought anyone would think to make self driven trucks. I also never thought about how much decision making went on behind making these trucks. When we were all given different scenarios where the self driven truck would inevitably have to end up taking a direction where they would crash into another car the responses were split. In one scenario the autonomous truck was behind a cargo truck with cargo falling out of the trunk.
We were tasked with saying whether we thought the truck should go forwards, to the left into a van, or to the right into a regular car. While some people said the truck should go to the left since the van wouldn't take as much damage as the car others said the autonomous truck should just go forwards. I found one of my classmates claims to be very intriguing as he said that when the driver purchases an autonomous truck that he should be aware of the liabilities that come with that vehicle. He also said that since they agreed to have such a vehicle that they should be prepared to be the one most affected given a car crash were to occur. Another student countered his argument by saying that when programming a autonomous truck for a consumer that a company should make sure to program it to where if anything were to happen the consumer will still be okay.
A lot of other people made some really good claims as well, such as what if there was a baby in one of the vehicles? I was really taken aback by our discussion as all the questions and scenarios brought up were things I had never even thought about. It really helped to understand the kind of questions programmers are faced with on the daily when creating autonomous vehicles.
