The Fight for the “Right to Repair” • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#131

Post by saidajigumi » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:04 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #89

saidajigumi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth should society allow (i.e. license) a randomly-modified software agent to operate a motor vehicle? The idea that any "hacker" has the right to arbitrarily change vehicular self-control software and deploy that on a public roadway is laughable.

Like the steering wheel that's deployed on all public roadways right now? I'm struggling to see the substantial difference between "self driving car with modified software should be disallowed because safety" and "manually driven car should be disallowed because safety". The former is still strictly safer.

> The former is still strictly safer.

I find this to be an absolutely ridiculous statement. Software as we know it today is incredibly brittle. What will eventually be put on the road as fully autonomous vehicular control software will have been HEAVILY QA'ed, and will be continuously QAed by telemetry. Random people modifying that software invalidate any proof-of-safety from the upstream QA and monitoring processes.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#132

Post by robryan » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:09 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #83

mikeash wrote: 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 don't think it's overblown at all. There would be large advantages to programming your car to be more aggressive and risky.

It is no different to a human driver deciding to speed.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#133

Post by twblalock » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:15 PM UTC

wfo wrote: post #53

robert1976 wrote: post #44

If substantial numbers of consumers are demanding fixable/open electronics, a manufacturer could comply and fill a great need! My guess is that market is v small. Regulation is unneccessary here.

If the market has failed to protect a right that is important, that's exactly when regulation is necessary. Handling the constant failures and disasters created by the market to the detriment of the populace is the purpose of regulations and the entire justification of the mixed economy model every modern society operates under.

What right has not been protected?

You do not have a right to require manufacturers to create repairable items. If you think such a right exists, prove it.

That's what this "right" to repair really is -- it is forcing manufacturers to make things that they don't currently make, and that most people don't want to buy. (If people wanted to buy them, someone would already be selling them and making money on that segment of the market.)

In effect, this would be the government taking action to promote the personal preferences of a small number of consumers. (If the number of consumers who wanted repairable products was not small, manufacturers would already be making such products by choice, and government action would not be necessary.)

When the government starts forcing manufacturers to make things that people don't want to buy, something has gone pretty wrong.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#134

Post by saidajigumi » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:24 PM UTC

jackhack wrote: post #93

saidajigumi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

More likely than one might want to think. A car traveling the same direction swerves into your lane, crowding you off the road. Does your self-driving car allow the collision and push the offending car back in order to hold your lane? Or does it avoid the collision and run you off the road? (As a person who drives in the mountains, this could have deadly results. If you live in the plains of Kansas, maybe not so much…

Yes, this situation is in the realm of the plausible, which has little to do with my comment. I'm not arguing against an analysis of the decisions made by a self-driving system. That's essential. I'm arguing against applying ethical models that utilize knowledge outside the realm of the knowledge or "reasoning" capacity of the drive algorithms.

To continue your example, I'll pose that any system with unilateral behavior of self-endangerment is extremely problematic. Motivating example: assume that self-driving cars will always avoid head-on collisions with other vehicles, even if there's no safe alternative. Including driving off a cliff. Attack: manual driver drives down the wrong side of the road (or maybe the middle of a two-lane road), forcing all of the self-driving cars off the cliff during evening commute hours to a hillside residential neighborhood. I suspect all systems that don't hew to some baseline of self-preservation are subject to similar modes of attack.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#135

Post by mdip » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:26 PM UTC

This was a hugely frustrating thing for me recently.

I picked up a used Pioneer AVR on eBay a few years ago and had no issues with it until I decided to plug my wife's older plasma television in because my main TV decided to take up an unusual smoking habit. It refused to connect to the new TV, indicating an HDCP error, despite working when plugged directly in to any of the attached devices. A quick google search yielded the likely culprit: my firmware was out of date. This model was one version behind but, unfortunately, was one model-year behind the ones that allowed for online updates. So I called Pioneer and was told they do not provide firmware updates directly to consumers and I could only get a firmware update from an authorized repair center. Besides the added frustration of having to disconnect the 30 or so cables, cart this thing across town, then come back at a later date to pick it up and plug it all back in, the fee was going to be half of what I had paid for the thing in the first place. So DRM caused a product I'm using legally to fail and the simple software fix was not allowed to be applied by me.

After following several dead links, I managed to find a forum where someone posted a Dropbox link to the firmware, making me a firmware pirate (aaarr!). This incredibly technical process that can only be performed at an authorized service center? Extract a file to a USB key, insert said key, turn on device while holding down two buttons and wait until the screen says it's done.

Pioneer's approach here succeeded in making me a "former customer" at some point in the future since the firmware update fixed my problem.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#136

Post by crispyambulance » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:27 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #19

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

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…

OK, but given that there will likely be vast numbers of self-driving cars (tens to hundreds of millions), 99.9999% leave room for a small but steady stream of horrific cases where the machine and its maker are called into question.

In wildly litigious societies like the USA, this could very well go beyond "not worth considering" and land firmly in the "existential threat" territory as far as self-driving car makers are concerned.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#137

Post by mikeash » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:32 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #85

mikeash wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 talking about the car's ethical choices in crashes, not the ethics of the programmers. Cars are not entities to which ethics can be ascribed; the humans building, designing, and programming them are.

Let me clarify: the topic here is specifically the ethics of whoever in a crash where the car may be able to get different people killed depending on what actions it takes. Speed limits and DRM are an entirely different topic.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#138

Post by dllthomas » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:39 PM UTC

aquadrop wrote: post #130

dllthomas wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because eventually, computers will be able to.

Those computers probably won't get into situation like this in the first place, being able to stop or react preventive. Anyway, it will be so rare an occasion with no guaranteed outcome (it's all about probabilities), so it's not really matters as much as it's discussed. With same kinda of attention you could ask if making and selling ladders is ethical, because people fall from them and hurt themselves.

> Those computers probably won't get into situation like this in the first place, being able to stop or react preventive.

It will always be the case that circumstances can change faster than something with the momentum of a fast moving car could adapt. Somewhere between "you're boned" and "your car saves the day" lies room for a scenario such as this, with potential room for a large amount of thinking.

> Anyway, it will be so rare an occasion with no guaranteed outcome (it's all about probabilities), so it's not really matters as much as it's discussed.

I agree that it will be rare, and that the concern is overblown. That said, "it's all about probabilities" is no reason something can't be vitally important.

> With same kinda of attention you could ask if making and selling ladders is ethical, because people fall from them and hurt themselves.

I think there is a substantive difference between the two. We're not asking whether selling a car that has a chance of injuring the user is ethical - we're fine with that. We're not even asking whether selling a car that has a chance of hurting others is ethical (already meaningfully different than the ladder case). We're asking about the ethical ramifications of making particular tradeoffs in "chance to hurt the user" versus "chance to hurt others". It's an interesting question, so it gets a lot of attention. I don't think most of those involved see it as a reason to prevent self-driving cars - long before the dilemma is really relevant, self-driving cars are already safer than human driven.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#139

Post by mindslight » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:42 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #115

mindslight wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, while market dynamics are quite important, "the market" doesn't actually constitute a valid argument for anything (as said thing would happen anyway), and usually indicates an attempt to stubbornly ignore differing opinions. The point is that companies are already asking for state intervention to protect their products as being a creative endeavor. So this is no longer some noble two-party private transac…

Of course market dynamics are a valid argument! They matter very much, because changes in the market affect peoples' quality of life. Policies that distort the market in a way that adversely affects peoples' quality of life should not be implemented without very good reasons. Even policies that are not expected to introduce such distortions often do, so it's good to be cautious about any proposals which could have un…

You're simultaneously wed to copyright because it's here, and arguing against a "right" to repair because it is not. So you're just repeating rationalizations for the current status quo.

For the third time now - copyright and patents presume to create a type of creative product wherein it is not the manufacture of the product that is really being sold to the consumer, but the design of it. A person buys a cell phone not for the plastic and doped silicon it is made of, but ostensibly for the abstract structure of the way that they are arranged.

Since the person is buying an instance of a design, it stands to reason that they should have the ability to service the physical manifestation and otherwise directly interact with that design.

It's not surprising that companies want to have their cake and eat it too - implementing only the half of an abstraction that takes away a consumer's rights while ignoring the second half and leaving them subject to law-of-the-jungle. They successfully wrote law like this for scratched cds, binary software, and DRM. But that hardly implies that their land grab is in the public's interest, appeals to "trickle-down" benefits notwithstanding.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#140

Post by mikeash » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:43 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #136

mikeash wrote: 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…

OK, but given that there will likely be vast numbers of self-driving cars (tens to hundreds of millions), 99.9999% leave room for a small but steady stream of horrific cases where the machine and its maker are called into question. In wildly litigious societies like the USA, this could very well go beyond "not worth considering" and land firmly in the "existential threat" territory as far as self-driving car makers a…

There are about 30,000 traffic fatalities per year in the US. If ethical problems come up 0.0001% of the time, then that's one ethically questionable fatality every 33 years. I think the industry can withstand this. Especially when self-driving cars drop the annual fatality rate from 30,000 to 3,000, or whatever it ends up being.