Pros And Cons Of The Normalization Of Driverless Vehicles

In this day and age, companies have been trying to find new ways to increase the efficiency of their employees. One way that businesses have been doing this is by promoting driverless cars for the future. In the United States alone there are over 250 million vehicles in use, and all of these vehicles create a lot of traffic (Hirsch). The massive amount of workers trying to commute creates opportunities for human error to occur which contributes to the average worker spending about forty-two hours per year in traffic (Dooley). If the average working person could work during this time, then he or she could get an extra week off of work; this would drastically increase people’s happiness because they would have more time to relax after work. Taking more time off also improves business because on average people who take more vacation are more likely to stay at their current job (Bajic). In the long run, it is cheaper for companies to have people take a vacation than to find new a person for a position. All of these issues could be solved by driverless cars. Even though the transition to driverless cars will have some
Cars without drivers have the capacity to make people feel powerless and out of control. One of the five basic needs identified by William Glasser is power over something else. By driving a car, a person has power over the vehicle. By not having drivers, the vehicle has power over the human. The inversion of power between fully automated machines and humans taps into common fears of “the sci-fi world” where humans become servants to machines (“The Editorial: Understanding the Future of Driverless Cars is Crucial to Navigating Present Concerns Regarding Infrastructure and Public Transit”). These sorts of fears arise with every new technology. Eventually, however, society tends to accept these new