When Will Computers Stop

Self driving cars seem like something of the future, yet they are already being produced today. Google has been working on a self driving car for a few years now.  The car uses LiDAR (Light Detection and Radar) as its eyes.  Throughout the testing the car has only been in two accidents.  The first was when the car was under human control.  The second accident the car was rear-ended at a stop light by a human driver.  So even with undeveloped technology the computer in the car has not caused an accident, but humans have.  The driverless car is safer than the human driving a car.

Many people think that the humans are inherently safer than anything else. There is some sort of voodoo behind machines that do not require a human to operate. Many people believe that these machines are more likely to fail, but time has shown this is not true.  In the case of driverless car, the Google car has not caused a single accident.  People are more inclined to trust a stranger behind the car that obtained there license from just a few hours of training an exams than a computer that has been tested and fine tuned for years.  Some people might say that a person is just smarter than a computer because of our powerful brains.  This is not true, the driverless car will always being more information faster than any person could. Driverless cars are the future and there may be a day when human driven cars become banned.

Because computers are really safer than any human there will come a point where it is too dangerous to have humans around driving cars.  This idea could be extended to other forms of transportation, such as plains and trains. One day if you want to get anywhere the only from point A to point B, other than walking, will be by computer. It is inevitable that computers will take over the jobs of people, it has already happened with assembly lines. At what point will computers no longer be able to take jobs, is there a certain threshold that computers would not be able to pass?

The first thing that comes to mind is any task that requires creativity.  But I believe even this will be surpassed by computers. As mentioned in class there is already a computer attempting to create every possible literary passage ever and every single musical riff ever.  Although the computer is using a brute force approach, it is still capable of creating creative works.  So computers have already got this one.

As long as computers can't build themselves and can't program themselves we should be fine.  As far as I know computer can't program themselves yet, but they can sure build each other (car assembly line).  In science fiction there are often stories of computers taking over the world.  I believe this is the next greatest crisis that we need to worry about.  Not necessarily robot overlords enslaving humanity, but computer taking ever single job we have.