In the Boston Globe last week, Hiawatha Bray wrote a fascinating article detailing one of the toughest programming challenges for self-driving cars: teaching them to turn left safely.  Left turns are challenging because they involve crossing lanes of oncoming traffic while interpreting psychology and predicting other humans' behavior.  You have to know how to read the signals to determine when it is safe to make the left turn in many different conditions. 

Driverless cars do not know how to read humans and anticipate what human drivers will do.  Humans know as they enter an intersection to begin to look for clues about what the other human drivers are doing, or likely to do so we can turn safely.  Self-driving cars aren't this smart (yet) as they cannot read body language. At some point, self-driving cars will begin to communicate with each other at intersections so they can safely turn left.

Source: https://apps.bostonglobe.com/business/graphics/2017/04/driverless/series/teaching-a-driverless-car-to-turn-left/. 

Distracted Driving is an epidemic.  It has resulted in increased car crash fatalities since 2014 and the upward trend of increased fatalities is likely to continue.  

We are tied to our phones.  Drivers are constantly making choices while driving to answer calls, text, or use voice activation to send texts or operate music, GPS and/or navigation systems.  

Using hands-free modes of operation do not eliminate the risks of distracted driving.  Studies show that going from hand-held to hands-free does not eliminate the mental demand on the driver of the car.  While we believe we are good multi-taskers, most people cannot do two mentally demanding tasks perfectly at the same time.  This means drivers' attention is pulled off driving and onto operating a hands free device which increases the likelihood of car accidents and injuries.  

Distracted driving accidents are fully preventable.  Using your phone or hand held device is visually distracting and could kill you or another person on the road.