9 Big Problems With Future Scientific Breakthroughs

3. Driverless Cars

Driverless cars would be marvellous, wouldn't they? No more "designated drivers", no more tiring late night drives, spending forever trying to find a parking spot would be a thing of the past and many are predicting that they would vastly improve road safety by removing the possibility of human error.

Most accidents could be completely avoided by handing the reigns over to a super-fast computer however, there are some cases where they're unavoidable, and that is where we run into problems (no pun intended).

Say, for example, that a driverless car is going at 40 mph with a truck behind it, when a teenager runs out into the road. If the car breaks to avoid the child, it causes a crash with the car behind it, if it carries on to avoid that crash, it hits the kid.

When this happens in real life, the human driver makes a split second decision and acts on instinct, but in the case of driverless cars, the ability to make ethical choices about which lives to preserve has to be programmed into it ahead of time.

Not only is this alarmingly premeditated, but it also raises all sorts of questions as to who is responsible for the casualties and deaths and how capable a machine is of making moral decisions.