Problems of Widespread Adoption of A.I. in Transportation
    In 2016 report of Stanfords One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, the study panel has explained the current and future applications of Artificial Intelligence in many areas of peoples life and points out existing difficulties that hinder its adoption. In the past few years, A.I. has been developed rapidly in some industries including transportation, healthcare and education. Thanks to the development and progress in hardware, self-driving cars adopting Artificial Intelligence have stepped into reality. Although automatic-driving cars, as being claimed, have a great potential and many advantages that will help it perform better in many tasks than human drivers do, it still faces two realistic problems that could slow down its adoption, costs and comfortability.
    John Greenough, as cited in the report, claims that automatic-driving vehicles will be widespread in 2020 (p. 20). However, in automobile industry, the price of self-driving cars is too high that not many people can afford. For example, Artificial Intelligence has already been adopted in some vehicles such as all models of Tesla. Tesla has already successfully launched full-autonomous hardware on their all car models, but the cheapest model, Model 3, is over 35,000 dollars. Besides Tesla, only a small portion of cars have self-driving system and that is not fully autonomous, only applicable in parking, which is not as expected as the cars that can be driven on city roads or highways without human control. In addition, when there are only few self-driving cars in the market, customers may choose cars with better appearance, fuel efficiency and performance instead of self-driving system that does not attract them, which will waste the advantages of A.I. in transportations such as safety. Only when self-driving system becomes universal that almost every car is equipped, self-driving technology will be able to maximize its benefits.  
    Furthermore, the study panel indicates that self-driving cars will release drivers from the steering wheels and they will be able to work and entertain on their way, which might make them live further than before because they do not need to pay as much attention as before to surroundings while driving, which is relaxing. Nevertheless, if the road condition is bad or the traffic is crowded, people will not feel comfortable when they look at their screens, the same feeling as someone drives the car and you look at your laptop when the car is bouncing or in a traffic jam. People will feel sick under such situation. Without ensured road condition and smooth traffic, the experience of sitting in a car will not be better than driving it. Therefore, people will not be willing to spend much time on commuting and live further than they used to. 
    Although self-driving cars have shown their reliability and safety during tests in the past few years, there are two main problems that will hinder its widespread adoption in peoples daily life, costs and comfortability. If full self-driving system is only available on expensive cars as Tesla and traffic condition is not improved, Artificial Intelligence in transportation will not be able to unleash its full potential and benefit human beings as the study panel expects. 



References
Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030. (2016, September). Retrieved from https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report
