I have been reading and writing a lot about autonomous vehicles and how they could revolutionise our transportation as they get more and more advanced and adopted by the mainstream. It seems inevitable at this point that this is the future we are headed and there's just no stopping it.

Looks like we will transition from completely human driven cars to semi autonomous ones where the role of a human would be to monitor and take over in situations and places where the car can't properly function on its own. We can see the latter happening already, in Tesla cars for example.

Then, as regulators get more comfortable and the tech advances even more, we will see completely autonomous cars with no steering wheels where human intervention would be literally zero. Yes, this is a scary thought but I think this future is inevitable.

There are many benefits to self-driving vehicles like a lot less accidents, more managed traffic due to interconnection of cars, less car ownerships, advantages to the environment, and so on. But there are also some really dark sides that I want to talk about today.

Dangers of Hacking

I think it is pretty well known that no system is completely safe and so if hackers can compromise the system of your car, they could take over control and cause any number of damages, even death in the extreme case.

Security experts and researchers have already demonstrated a number of ways that they can remotely take control of a self-driving car and make it do anything they want. Imagine hackers taking control over an entire company's self-driving vehicles' fleet. It could cause devastation on a really large scale.

Privacy Concerns

The companies making the autonomous vehicles are all collecting every single iota of data they can, mostly for improving their systems but I think this will continue even after the vehicles have reached near perfection autonomy.

This causes huge privacy concerns for the users. The companies would know exactly where they visit, for how long, their driving habits and maybe audio and video recordings of them sitting around in their vehicles.

Also, there are cameras and other sensors designed to gather data from the outside world and this raise privacy concerns for people just walking about. Everything and everyone could be constantly recorded and if government agencies get access to this data, they could literally search for anyone and find them instantly.

Lots of Targeted Ads

Expanding upon the last point, companies could use your data and learn about your behaviour based on the places you visit. This data could be used by them to show you ads, either on your phone or right there on the windshield (if cars have augmented reality features, which they likely will).

Imagine driving by a McDonald's and getting ads on your windshield about a 'really good deal'. Companies might even opt to sell all of this data to even more marketers, and sooner or later, you would be drowned in ads. "Using your data to show you ads", now where have I seen this before?