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The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

smithsonianmag.com

61–70 of 325 posts

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#61
While I hate companies suing people for repairing their own properties, "right" has been overused so many places. What a sensational word! I have the "right" to not being sued! What?

I would advocate companies certify other entities as repairing authorities or just do a good job themselves; providing the support. Of course it will reduce their product sale and that would be a huge deal to us consumers as well because we want them to do well and providing better product next round.

However, it is dangerous that we use sale as THE primary measure. I believe companies should take pride in the quality of their products and services. They should inspire customer loyalty, not unethical growth to please Wall Street.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is pretty likely that the full self driving system will be the thing that gets licensed. If that were the case, your exploited systems would not be licensed for operation on public roads. This can be completely orthogonal to whether you are able to modify the vehicle or not.

How would you detect these changes in a licensed system if you are allowed to modify the vehicle? If you do behavior based testing - the person will just hide the features behind a backdoor so the testing looks normal. If you do some type of checksum based testing, you have defacto made modification illegal, and it is bypassed by doing a "factory reset" prior to the licensing check, and loading the modified software…

What's to stop someone from driving without a license under the current system? A bunch of cops looking for illegal and unsafe behavior. If you're driving without a license but in a manner that cannot be detected then you're not likely be causing harm anyway, so letting you "slip through the cracks" is no great loss to society.

If someone modifies their car's software to tailgate and pass other vehicles at speed on the shoulder they'll likely be detained, investigated, and prosecuted. If someone hacks their firmware causing their car to always travel 5mph under the speed limit to aid fuel efficiency then they might not get caught, but we have no reason to want to catch them anyway.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#64
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. The odds of being in a situation where there's any sort of ethical choice to make are so remote as to not really be worth considering. 99.9999% of the time, the correct choice when faced with an impending crash will be to brake as hard as the driving surface allows and steer to avoid obstacles as much as possible. In any case, tinkering and commons already intersect…

> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. Not at all. One programmer is going to make choices that affect ~ a billion vehicles one day, so something that doesn't happen 99.9999% per hour will happen 100 times per hour. And it's going to be more mundane things, like programming the speed limit 1 mph slower results in 500 less deaths per year, or using drm/copyright to stop poor people from getting driving s…

To me the question is relatively uninteresting because it seems obvious.

As long as cars belong to individuals they have the responsibility to favor the interests of those individuals as far as law permits. Where and how much the community is to be preferred over the individual, the community should specify in laws. People running code that breaks those laws should be liable for that codes actions. (I could imagine an ethics slider settable at the owners choice within the legal limits that allows them to discount the lives of the passengers compared to the lives of others, on the condition that they notify their other passengers).

It's possible that ultimately the right choice is to move to a different model, but in that case, the AI should not be owned by the individual who bought the car and has a reasonable expectation that it work on their behalf.

The ethical decision on the car is no different than the ethical decision that we ask the human driver to make in similar situations (which as the gp noted are incredibly rare), or that we trust the human driver to make when we are passengers in their car. In fact I even doubt that it makes sense to legislate it, since we haven't so far for e.g. uber drivers, but perhaps testing will indicate that we should.

In terms of the speed limits, society has already decided to accept a huge number of deaths per year that would almost all be preventable with a speed limit of 35mph, so I don't see how the introduction of AI drivers affects this question.

I would like to see laws that say that all source code for self driving cars must be publicly auditable and pass tests before being approved for road use. Running code that has not been safety tested by the state will leave you uninsurable and personally liable for its actions. We should aim to make running the test suite as accessible as possible in order to allow innovation, but it should still give us a high confidence that the driver behaves correctly according to the law.

I take pretty much all of this from analogy with human drivers: when we're driven by someone else, we have relatively little control over their ethical slider setting, we have high speed limits for humans because we think the convenience of the many is more important than the lives of the few, we don't let brand new humans drive without having some indication that they'll make the right decisions. None of these problems seem to be particularly changed by the introduction of AI.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#65

I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues. There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for the…

Companies are spending billions of dollars in r&d to build self driving cars and you think a hobbiest is going to modify his car with his own "aggressive" self driving system?

If you don't want a catalytic converter on your car for performance or intentionally running rich a/f mix etc.. you can put the O2 sensor into a "spark plug tool" that'll trick the O2 sensor into thinking all is well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqDmmLQ4pGk

Hacks are not required to be sophisticated to be effective and people will find them. Maybe for example if you place a 1/4 inch of extra plastic in front of the front facing radar it'll make the car follow more aggressively then it's calibrated for, who knows! that's a made up example but I expect this stuff is going to happen as it already does.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#66
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of AI is based around training sets not traditional Algorithms like your thinking of. There are simply to many edge cases to deal with by hand. Yes, there is also a lot of hand coding in these systems, but good training sets are very critical.

The choice of those training sets, including their contents, their size, how they are consumed, and the algorithms they are fed to, affects the output. Therefore, programmers make decisions. It is unavoidable.

I don't think the people doing a million miles driving Google cars around are classified as programmers.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#67

I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues. There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for the…

Companies are spending billions of dollars in r&d to build self driving cars and you think a hobbiest is going to modify his car with his own "aggressive" self driving system?

Hobby, hobbier, hobbiest?

Hobbyist.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issues with IoT devices being bricked, Tesla 'ownership', and so on really do need scrutiny from a functional body with a hint of the public's interest at heart. Oh great, another bureaucracy. Why should manufacturers be forced to make their products repairable by users? Why don't they have the right to make a non-repairable product, and let the market decide whether or not it succeeds? If people really want re…

Okay, but to be consistent you have to argue for getting rid of copyrights and patents as well. It makes no sense to regard these devices as "creative works", yet then deny that the end user has been sold an instance of this abstract structure.

How exactly did you derive this from my argument? I see no logical connection.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#69
post #19

I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues. There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for the…

I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. The odds of being in a situation where there's any sort of ethical choice to make are so remote as to not really be worth considering. 99.9999% of the time, the correct choice when faced with an impending crash will be to brake as hard as the driving surface allows and steer to avoid obstacles as much as possible. In any case, tinkering and commons already intersect…

> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown.

Agreed. At least at the level these cars are likely to enter the market, the whole concept of what the car "knows" isn't likely to extend to "other people", "my passengers", "inanimate objects" and a probability matrix of injury/death/damage among these categories. Instead of this heavily anthropomorphized view, cars are much more likely to have a highly simplified, "bug-like" level of information to work from.

This isn't harping on a "technology is neutral" vibe, which I view as obviously false. Just that many of the high-minded philosophical models presented to date don't appear to map well to a likely actual embodiment of "ethical" decisions that may get embedded into vehicular software. If the model is a bad fit for the real-world problem(s) encountered, it's simply not going to be very useful for informing solutions to that problem.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#70
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. Not at all. One programmer is going to make choices that affect ~ a billion vehicles one day, so something that doesn't happen 99.9999% per hour will happen 100 times per hour. And it's going to be more mundane things, like programming the speed limit 1 mph slower results in 500 less deaths per year, or using drm/copyright to stop poor people from getting driving s…

"Per hour" is rather ridiculous. I'm talking about per crash . There are a couple million vehicle crashes in the US each year, so if it really is 99.9999%, that's two or three ethical crises per year here. Among a billion vehicles it would be maybe ten per year. And honestly I'd be surprised if it's that many. When have you ever heard of a crash where there was any kind of ethical dilemma in the response? People keep…

I'm actually familiar with a situation like this, the person was on a highway at night and came around a corner to see a deer lying in the road and a crowd right behind the deer. There was a couple of people off to either side. They couldn't brake in time to stop and not harm the people on the other side of the deer.
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