You scared, bro? Maybe your autonomous car should ease your fears
In a recent survey by Myplanet of various technologies, “autonomous driving” came in as the most uncomfortable of the thirty-five technologies at 66.8% of the Americans surveyed. To put that in perspective, one of the technologies near the middle of the pack was “surgical robot” at 42% negative, which translates into “I’d rather your ‘bot cuts me open than have it drive me to the corner store.” As summarized well by Jason Cottrell, Myplanet CEO, “Customers have made up their minds about autonomous driving and it’s skewed heavily to the negative.” Other studies, in fact, corroborate that level of fear (e.g. AAA’s study suggested 71%), and suggest the cause of that anxiety varies. Some potential customers understand that although robots are intended to erase human error, they are programmed by imperfect humans where software has upwards of fifty (50) bugs per thousand (1,000) lines of code, i.e. as many as 25M bugs in an autonomous vehicle. Also, some are aware that malware infections have risen every year for the past decade and are likely to exceed 1B in 2020, especially since cybersecurity attacks are up 600% during the coronavirus pandemic. And some potential customers are simply afraid to relinquish perceived control as evidenced by 2.6% of the population having a “fear of flying”. Regardless of Functional Safety, Cybersecurity or unfounded root causes, this cumulative fear far exceeds other commonly known fears such as “fear of the dark” (11%), “fear of heights” (7.5%) or “fear of spiders” (3.5%).