In the long drive from Cubao to Nueva Vizcaya (and back), where Dr. Atty. Noel G. Ramiscal delivered several Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) lectures for the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, Nueva Vizcaya Chapter, Dr. Ramiscal was utterly grateful to the graceful and precise maneuverings of the Victory Liner Bus drivers, especially through the steep landslide prone areas of this province.
In preparing for one of his lectures, Dr. Ramiscal decided to tackle one of the truly “hot” and trending topics in cyberlaw, which is that of smart cars that can ferry humans and goods through smooth or treacherous terrains, without the need of human assistance. The notion of intelligent cars driving themselves into some automated highway systems have been around since the late 1930’s when General Motors introduced this concept in the 1939 World Fair. 50 years later Carnegie Mellon engineers successfully steered an Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network (“ALVINN”) through a roadway utilizing camera and laser range finder images. Almost two decades after that, vehicles that won in the 2004, 2005, and 2007 Grand Challenges of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”) were based on the ALVINN prototype. Google’s driverless vehicles, which were shown in the 2013 film “The Internship” underwent a makeover in 2015 and are now plying streets in the U.S. with no record of any serious crash incident [see Thierer and Hagemann, REMOVING ROADBLOCKS TO INTELLIGENT VEHICLES AND DRIVERLESS CARS, Wake Forest Journal of Law and Policy, June, 2015, 339].
Dr. Atty. Noel G. Ramiscal’s lecture on Social Media E-Discovery for IBP Nueva Vizcaya, September 9, 2015
The race to win the hearts, minds and purses of the travelling/commuting public has been on the rise, with BMW and Mercedes Benz coming up with rival luxurious prototypes of these smart cars which they foresee will be the next wave of technology that will be adopted by consumers in the fashion of smartphones and android tablets. As shown in a video presented by Dr. Ramiscal, these cars are so intelligent that they could find parking spaces for their busy/preoccupied owners once they alight from the cars, and these cars can parallel drive flawlessly. Smart cars are foreseen to be the answer to the commuting challenges of people who do not drive, those who are incapacitated to drive, elderly people, children and people with special needs. What is more, these smart cars are, from the pieces of evidence gathered by the vehicle industries worldwide, better than human drivers. The Eno Center for Transportation projected that in the U.S. alone, the annual benefits of “50% market penetration of driverless cars (that is, 50% of all vehicles on the road being fully autonomous vehicles) are estimated to include 9600 lives saved, almost 2 million fewer crashes, close to $160 billion in comprehensive cost savings, a 35% reduction in daily freeway congestion, and almost 1700 travel hours saved. Even at the low estimate of 10% market penetration (that is, for every nine manual cars on the road there is one driverless vehicle), “this technology has the potential to save over 1000 lives per year and offer tens of billions of dollars in economic gains, once added vehicle costs and possible roadside hardware and system administration costs are covered” (cited in Thierer and Hagemann).
Despite these projections, are these driverless cars legal? In the U.S., several states have passed laws that still require a licensed human driver to be in the cars and navigate them in case they ran awry. Some states require that a manual override feature that is accessible to the human driver must be in the car. From these indications, there is still legislative hesitance about the over-all acceptability of humans relinquishing total control to the intelligent car’s computing system. This hesitation may be addressed to some extent with the current development in the vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications platforms that some companies are pushing for.
Aside from these, the advent and penetration of smart cars in the real world markets would displace most, if not all the human drivers and chauffeurs who rely on their driving skills to earn a living. They will go by the way the horse and buggy carriage drivers went over a century ago (except for the current “kotseros” in Quiapo and Intramuros that eke a living from vendors and tourists). As pointed out by Dr. Ramiscal in this seminal lecture of his, legal definitions, insurance liability, torts concepts, criminal law, security and privacy standards that govern providers and manufacturers of these smart cars and the consumers/commuters will have to be re-written, re-adjusted and re-written some more. Ethical issues concerning assigning economic values to software algorithms that decide who will live and who will die in crash situations will have to be confronted. This is a new legal field that will beckon to new and enterprising lawyers who are tech savvy and insightful enough to put themselves ahead in the game.
Dr. Ramiscal desires to give his full appreciation to the IBP National and the IBP Nueva Vizcaya lawyers, who gamely attended, listened to, and participated in his MCLE lectures in the span of two days that are filled with new developments in the Information Technology and Communications fields and their intersections with diverse areas (explored and largely unexplored until now) in the Law.
IBP Nueva VIzcaya Pres. Atty. Leslie Costales introducing Dr. Ramiscal, September 9, 2015
Especial thanks to the dashing and dynamic IBP Nueva Vizcaya Chapter President!
Dr. Ramiscal also would like to note the generosity of the IBP Nueva Vizcaya Chapter in billeting him at the Saber Inn which was unpretentious,
IBP Nueva Vizcaya, Saber Inn
IBP Nueva Vizcaya, Saber Inn, Dr. Atty. Noel G. Ramiscal posing in front of QUADRO CAFE, September 9, 2015
IBP Nueva Vizcaya, Saber Inn, Dr. Atty. Noel G. Ramiscal posing in front of QUADRO CAFE, September 9, 2015[/caption] commodious, comfortable and which has certainly one of the best restaurants with unbeatable value and accommodating staff (Quadro Cafe) in the Philippines. He is especially fond of their beef with ampalaya, chicken wings, sinigang na hipon, chow fan/chorizo rice and puto bumbong, the flavors of which pleasantly linger in the palate! Deo Gratias!
Philippine Law Bytes: TheCyberLawyer Issues by Dr. Attorney Noel Guivani Ramiscal 