			Stanford One Hundred Year Study

	Artificial Intelligence has made significant progress over the years in various domains as highlighted in the paper and helps to solve many problems. Self-driving cars is a rapidly upcoming technological product with brimming benefits, however, the designing of these cars raises critical ethical dilemmas. The ethical dilemmas like taking decisions in unforeseen circumstances where damage has to be caused and breaking rules in emergency situations are a few challenges which programmers have to provide solutions for. Further, self-driving cars are also responsible for giving industries like insurance and automobile manufacturing a rough time.

	Self-driving cars should be able to make smart decisions and be ready to break rules in certain circumstances. According to Lin (2013), though humans tend to be ethical and act in a wise manner in real life situations, they can also disregard traffic rules in the case of an emergency or when there is no traffic. However, questions arise as to whether self-driving cars could be programmed to be able to make ethical decisions upon their own discretion and execute the necessary steps. Programmers are striving hard to program self-driven cars that not only follow the rules but also are able to make smart decisions in real-life situations. Further, while developing smarter self-driven cars, programmers face tough tasks when they have to instruct such a car on how it must act in an unfortunate situation. Lin(2013) highlights a dilemma where a child or a certain number of adults could be saved under an unforeseen circumstance. Programmers designing automated cars are always in the dilemma of whether their algorithm must minimize loss of life or always protect the owners of the car and children. If the car is designed in a way that can take the owners life in certain situations, then nobody would be ready to buy the car to keep their life at stake. Automated cars can negatively affect the insurance industry as well as lead to misuse. Lin(2013) predicts that the insurance industry will be threatened as self-driving cars could avoid accidents almost completely, leading to an almost negligible risk of being insured. On the other hand, it could lead to a large number of accidents too which could lead to severe losses. Hence the insurance company is at a risk of losing money from both sides. Self-driving cars could be responsible for an increase in alcohol consumption as the passengers would not have to worry about getting penalized for drunk-driving. This would increase the alcohol problems in the city as people would be least bothered about finding a way home. The regular automobile manufacturing industry would lose its market share and would have to start making self-driving cars. A number of people would be unemployed due to self-driving cars from Uber drivers, chauffeurs and eventually even all means of public transport. This would create a lot of unemployment in the economy which could affect the GDP of the country. Another important point to consider is that if any damage takes place through a self-driving car then there is no authority to take the blame for it. 

	Self-driving cars may have tons of benefits ,however, there are some major challenges which need to be solved and long term effects need to be thought about. Self-driving cars will probably come into existence when all the cars hitting the road are autonomous and the cars will be able to talk to each other ,which would prevent any kind of damage.



References
•	Lin, P. (2013). The ethics of automated cars.
The Atlantic


