Before you answer that question, consider a recent report from the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). In that report, ENISA describes autonomous vehicles as “highly vulnerable to a wide range of attacks” that could jeopardize passengers, pedestrians, and people in other vehicles.
Autonomous vehicles, the report explained, “use artificial intelligence systems, which employ machine-learning techniques to collect, analyze and transfer data, in order to make decisions that in conventional cars are taken by humans. These systems, like all IT systems, are vulnerable to attacks that could compromise the proper functioning of the vehicle.”
Among the attacks considered in the report are: sensor attacks with beams of light; overwhelming object detection systems; back-end malicious activity; and adversarial machine learning attacks presented in training data or the physical world.
To prevent such attacks, ENISA recommended that the automotive industry should embrace a security by design approach. Cybersecurity should become the central element of AI design. If autonomous vehicles are to become the norm, the automotive industry needs to become more prepared to handle emerging cybersecurity issues connected to AI.
Or, we could listen to Elon Musk who called AI humanity’s “biggest existential threat” and compared it to “summoning the demon.”