In the coming days, hackers and security experts from all over the world will gather in the third-floor ballroom of the North Tower to hack a variety of targets, including a Tesla Model 3. The goals will range from simply taking over the vehicle’s infotainment system or hacking its key fobs—like picking a traditional keyhole, but with code rather than a lock pick—to more sinister targets, such as taking over the Model 3’s autonomous driving features, giving the hacker total control. If it’s that easy to take a Tesla hostage, what’s to stop a malicious actor from driving the car (and its passengers) right off a bridge?

While the goal for hackers is to win money (more than $1 million in cash and prizes), and possibly even a Tesla Model 3, the larger objective for the event, Pwn2Own, is to prove just how vulnerable, and, in turn, how dangerous, these technologies can be when left unsecured. (Tesla, which is involved in the contest and has made a car available to the Pwn2Own organizers, is hoping the hackers can help identify software bugs. Musk, who has been vociferous about what could go wrong with A.I. in the future, sees this as an opportunity to improve the security of Tesla.)

In the past, the contest has been relatively innocuous, challenging hackers to break into a Web browser or computer operating system. This year, for the first time, the contest will entice people to prove that a roughly 4,000-pound vehicle, which can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds, can be taken over by a rogue agent anywhere on the planet. And, as the contest perfectly illustrates, if you can hijack one Tesla, there’s nothing to stop you from repeating the process. From a national-security standpoint, the consequences are horrifying. Why would Russia, China, or Iran waste valuable weapons, or risk the death of their own soldiers, to attack America if they can simply smash 180,000 autonomous vehicles into each other? Why would ISIS need to radicalize people who live in England, New York, or Paris, to drive a truck into crowds of innocent people, if they could simply hack into a car, floor the gas, and point it down a city street?

As we see with so many mass killings around the globe, one lunatic can cause disproportionate carnage. What would happen if that one lunatic had incredible programming skills? What if that person worked for a company like Tesla, and somehow managed to send an over-the-air update without the rest of the company’s knowledge? What if a Boeing 737 Max software bug wasn’t limited to one class of aircraft, but affected every Boeing plane in the sky, causing them all to plummet simultaneously?

For the past few years, Elon Musk has described Tesla as more akin to a computer than a car. Not only is a Tesla able to update its own software while it’s parked in your driveway, it’s also one of the first cars to be marketed as partially autonomous. Even today, Musk says, fully driverless technology will be available in less than two years. “I think we will be ‘feature complete’ on full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year,” Musk said in a recent podcast interview. “I am certain of that. That is not a question mark.”

We are now repeating the same myopic mistakes that we made during the rise of social media, with potentially more dangerous consequences. Across the globe, companies are racing to move A.I. and automation out of labs and into our driveways, schools, financial markets, and battlefields. And we have no idea whether we’re putting ourselves and our society in imminent danger. Certainly our government is doing nothing to stop or slow the inevitable. Hundreds of billions of dollars in shareholder value are waiting to be unlocked by these technologies, which will allow us to watch Netflix or YouTube videos (and plenty of ads) instead of touching a steering wheel. The question we should be asking is: are we setting ourselves up for a future that we won’t be able to turn off?

Ironically, we might have the Trump administration to thank for mitigating a potential technological catastrophe at scale. As Axios has reported, Donald Trump thinks driverless-car technology is “crazy,” and says he’d never let a computer drive him around. “You know when he’s telling a story, and he does the hand motions,” said a source who has heard Trump talk about hypothetical accidents involving self-driving cars. “He says, ‘Can you imagine: you’re sitting in the back seat, and all of a sudden this car is zigzagging around the corner and you can’t stop the fucking thing?’”

For once, the president has a point. While Trump can’t stop the progression of technology, the government should be working to put in place regulations that would prevent millions of cars from zigzagging all over the place and potentially killing countless people. Because, as we’ve seen time and again, companies like A.E.C.L., or Boeing, or Facebook, can’t be trusted to regulate themselves.

This article has been updated.