191–200 of 325 posts
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You bring up very interesting questions, but the self-driving car should be taken as a very special case. A manufacturer can hardly argue that they have a safety reason to keep you from repairing your TV, printer, or cell phone.
Do you remember CRT TVs? Those were pretty dangerous to open up.
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…
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But by then the car will be able to engage its flight module, take off, and fly you directly home.
Maybe. Flight generally uses quite a bit more energy.
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> No matter what algorithm the self driving car is running, it is going to be 100 times safer than you driving the car. That seems very suspect.
I think that you highly underestimate how bad humans are at driving. Being better than a human driver is a very low bar to pass.
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> 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…
If the cars obey the posted speed limit and slow down and split-the-difference when on curves or near hazards (such as children running on the sidewalk), the hypothetical moral dilemmas shouldn't even happen. So far, I've only heard of one accident involving a Google car, and there wasn't a fatality.
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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…
Realistically, you handle such things via deterrence. When an accident happens, the car's software can be dumped (in some cases), and criminal/civil liability can be assessed based on the results. The risk of heavy fines or jail will probably keep most people from hacking their self-driving cars to be more aggressive.
I see unsafe modified cars almost every week right now.
Couple that with every lighter, ever thinner, ever flimsier, glue based laminated construction, needed to hit market size and weight requirements, and you get absolutely no economic sense in designing for, or supporting, repair.
In a sense, it's our growing skill at mass fabrication, and the growing cost of skilled human knowledge workers, that is driving this "not economically repairable" phenomenon.
Do we really want heavier, clunkier, more expensive things, that can be repaired? The planet may approve, but the Wall Mart shopper sure doesn't!
Honestly, most products are becoming so integrated, and so delicate, that "repair" means "replace the one expensive bit." Couple that with every lighter, ever thinner, ever flimsier, glue based laminated construction, needed to hit market size and weight requirements, and you get absolutely no economic sense in designing for, or supporting, repair. In a sense, it's our growing skill at mass fabrication, and the growi…
John Deere is attempting to make sales of their tractors 'leases' to enforce their ban on self repair: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
My thinking is: let them lock them down and after a few years, someone who genuinely values openness will come in as a competitor. If you pass a law requiring some kind of openness, companies against openness will just hang out at the edge of what is legally permissible.
I am curious what the HN crowd thinks of this, if a legislative solution could be desirable, and why.