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Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

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11–20 of 331 posts

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#11

So what is the solution? Let emergency services have a remote control STOP button? But it would have many implications for passengers too

Maybe emergency services should have the ability to block autonomous vehicles from particular areas in real time. Certainly the companies should collaborate with them to produce a lot more training data for this kind of scenario.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#12

Less anybody think "this is no big deal", let me assure you as a former firefighter, cars driving over fire hoses is a MAJOR deal. Whether the car is driven by a human or AI. And sadly, humans do this all too often anyway. FWIW, the reason(s) this is bad - if not obvious - include: - The hose can (and does) get snagged on the car's under-carriage, which can rip it away from a hydrant, or engine, or yank an attack lin…

I'm slightly alarmed by the general scenario of a driverless vehicle approaching an emergency situation. A human-driven vehicle will respond to gestures from firefighters to go around, etc. And even most dull humans will have more situational awareness and flexibility than an AI is likely to, particularly as these sorts of scenarios are edge cases by definition. E.g. depending on your jurisdiction and the situation, it may be proper to run a red light to make way for an emergency vehicle. The insistence of the driver waving frantically at you is part of that judgement call. Software is not ready for that yet, I think.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#13
post #11

So what is the solution? Let emergency services have a remote control STOP button? But it would have many implications for passengers too

Maybe emergency services should have the ability to block autonomous vehicles from particular areas in real time. Certainly the companies should collaborate with them to produce a lot more training data for this kind of scenario.

Seems like this would be super useful for allowing emergency services access in the kind of scenarios where human drivers are expected to pull over and let them through. I'm kinda surprised this kind of integration wasn't a condition on the permit to run them.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#14

So what is the solution? Let emergency services have a remote control STOP button? But it would have many implications for passengers too

Perhaps some sort of beacon emergency services can deploy which would tell self-driving vehicles to avoid an area.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#15

So what is the solution? Let emergency services have a remote control STOP button? But it would have many implications for passengers too

The solution is recognizing that we are nowhere near ready for driverless cars. With "ordinary" software, you can look at all of the use cases and if you solve 5% of them in a really good way, you can be successful, users will self-select whether those 5% of the use cases are valuable for them, and then not use your software for anything else.

With driverless self-driving vehicles, you have no such comfort. Even if your software correctly handles 99.9% of the use cases, the remaining .1% will get someone injured or killed, and people climbing into taxis cannot self-select whether their route will pass by a fire, in which case "take a cab with a human driver."

Driverless cars have a huge moral hazard here. Their incentives are all around serving their passengers, but the downsides are offloaded onto pedestrians, cyclists, other automobile users, and now firefighters and the citizens they are protecting.

No "solution" should "beg the question" by taking it as axiomatic that driverless cars at the current level of capability are necessary. They are not.

We are not curing cancer or feeding the world here, we are trying to make people get rich by eliminating the cost of labour for a human driver. No way this calculus should prioritize investors over human lives in any sane society.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Escalators have big red “Emergency Stop” buttons anyone can press when things go wrong. Why not one for autonomous vehicles, too?

Carjackings and other crimes where people could press the button in a bad part of town and pull the riders out.

Or just jump in front of the car which is supposed to stop and then your companions handle carjacking the immobilized vehicle. There are many ways to normally stop or trick an autonomous vehicle without needing a big red button to stop it. Spike strips are used by police to stop human driven vehicles all the time.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#19
post #5

Aren't they supposed to respond to gestures? What do they do if someone is directing traffic? And I guess the question if they do respond to traffic directing gestures: how do they avoid obvious pranks from drunk people?

I doubt it. That's a really hard problem. Ignoring the machine vision component, if someone on the side of the road waves at their friend, should cars going by stop?

Since there's no way to take control of these vehicles, I imagine they fall back to a service center with remote drivers when they come across the unexpected. Anything involving flashy lights should fall into this category.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#20
post #12

Less anybody think "this is no big deal", let me assure you as a former firefighter, cars driving over fire hoses is a MAJOR deal. Whether the car is driven by a human or AI. And sadly, humans do this all too often anyway. FWIW, the reason(s) this is bad - if not obvious - include: - The hose can (and does) get snagged on the car's under-carriage, which can rip it away from a hydrant, or engine, or yank an attack lin…

I'm slightly alarmed by the general scenario of a driverless vehicle approaching an emergency situation. A human-driven vehicle will respond to gestures from firefighters to go around, etc. And even most dull humans will have more situational awareness and flexibility than an AI is likely to, particularly as these sorts of scenarios are edge cases by definition. E.g. depending on your jurisdiction and the situation,…

Sounds like having support for interpreting human gestures will solve some of the problems. But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one?

Such kinds of problems will only scale up as we apply L5 cars take on more public roads, but I wonder how long or what changes will have to be done in current road signs, critical city infra to support them.

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