Driverless vehicles are on their way

Driverless vehicles? Years ago this would have seemed very futuristic to have vehicles that can indeed drive themselves. However it is now becoming reality. Google and Tesla are dominating at present but it appears that Samsung are now in the race with an $8bn purchase! Pocket change eh? Being a fan of technology you may think that I would be totally up for this type of advancement. However I have reservations that I think that most of us agree with. 1. Security We have heard how successful hackers can be recently and that they can strike even the most secure of establishments, FBI, NASA, CIA and ermmm Hilary Clinton? With a driverless vehicle there will be millions of lines of code written in to enable it to function all of which has to work all of the time, every time in real-time. Now without going into too much detail how code is written all code that is written can have bugs. In some cases bugs can be harmless, much like the real world, however other bugs can be deadly whilst others can just leave you weak. It is the latter point of weakness that is the concern with security. Should a bug be within code that gives weakness to a key piece of security protecting external access there is always the risk that hackers can try to exploit this. I see hackers as two sets of people 1) mischievous type who may hack the vehicle who may set the horn to honk whilst indicating left or 2) evil hacker who may disable your braking system when you reach 60mph. Hacker 1 is generally ok to deal with but hacker 2 is going to make you suffer badly. 2. Your life is not in your hands So several million lines of code does not write itself. There are large teams of software developers of whom are which are very smart individuals however as humans we make mistakes. There are however multiple checks that are put in place to help avoid mistakes creeping in, again a bug. It was not all that long ago where Telsa unfortunately had one of their customers die in an accident where the auto pilot software did not recognise a white truck against a bright white back ground. Was this a bug? It is difficult to categorise this as a bug but it highlights the difficulty that the software engineers face when trying to cover all eventualities. I am sure as time moves on the concerns about security shall reduce to a point that it will be practically impossible to hack a vehicle. Also it will come about that ALL possible sequences will be coded so no matter what happens the software will take the best and course of action. The problem with the last part I feel is extremely difficult to solve, for example, how do you code a car to take the choice of colliding with say a group of pedestrians to avoid injury to the driver? As a human this itself will be a difficult choice to make however if you had to make this choice at least you know you made it. Also it goes without saying that we all see every day people making crazy choices when driving to which there appears to be no thought process at all. To me for now, I am happy with having to make my decision on which way my car will turn.