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

businessinsider.com

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

#51

Post by lalopalota »

drdaeman wrote: post #25
nonfamous wrote: post #4

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?

Passenger safety concerns? If anyone would be able to stop an autonomous vehicle, it may be not always in the passenger's best interest. Could be OK if the passenger has an override, though - if they decide to tell the car to not comply with a legitimate stop request, it should be treated as if they'd be driving themselves and refused to stop. And, obviously, emergency stop should initiate stopping, but the vehicle s…

Even while unmanned it could be exploited. A robo-taxi's competitor could hit the emergency stop on any vehicles they see driving empty.

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

#52

Post by ghaff »

Bilal_io wrote: post #32
redtriumph wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need for human gesture, just put a stop sign or a road closed sign. These were likely taught to the model as its ABCs

As a general principle, one can imagine special signals relevant to autonomous vehicles. But there's probably something of a chicken and egg sort of thing and I have problems with a lot of processes being required to deal with early adopters of this sort of technology.

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

#53

Post by kelnos »

jxf wrote: post #31
redtriumph wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one? A car shouldn't make that call. It should err on the side of safety and assuming the emergency is real. When you see flashing lights on the highway coming up behind you, do you think "I bet that ambulance is faking it so they can get home faster", or do you just move over?

I think the potential issue is that the driver of a non-emergency vehicle could start gesturing in particular ways that could trigger the autonomous car to think it was an emergency vehicle.

So then you have to teach the car what all the various kinds of emergency vehicles look like, in every jurisdiction. That's hard enough, but then what happens if it's an unmarked police car, for example?

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

#54

Post by 7952 »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #3

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

The problem of chaotic vehicle interactions exist irrespective of self driving cars. What stops progress is the glacial pace of legacy car companies and the libertarian nature of car culture.

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

#55

Post by ghaff »

mattlondon wrote: post #46

To be honest, as a human driver I'd not give a second thought to driving over a hose. Not saying that is right or not, just surprised this is apparently an issue worth smashing a car up for. I have no recollection of this being in the highway code for instance

Seriously? You'd just drive over a firehose because it was in your way?

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

#56

Post by JohnFen »

lflux wrote: post #38
arp242 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it? I don't see how the firefighters did anything wrong.

Firefighters practically salivate at the possibility of smashing the windows of a car parked in front of a hydrant they need to access for supply. This isn't much different.

So? In both cases, the cars are impeding their urgent work. It's not like firefighters are just going around smashing windows on cars that aren't doing something very, very wrong.

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

#57

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #44
jxf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one? A car shouldn't make that call. It should err on the side of safety and assuming the emergency is real. When you see flashing lights on the highway coming up behind you, do you think "I bet that ambulance is faking it so they can get home faster", or do you just move over?

But then you have essentially enabled everyone to wave your car to a stop, which could be very convenient for certain types of people. I think the simple truth is that we are still a long long long time away from fully autonomous cars to be safely deployed anywhere except on very specific paths that are mostly closed off to everyone else. But they could be tremendously useful there, for instance driving buses or airp…

So this is currently possible today: I can walk out on any street today and redirect traffic. With or without my reflective vest, drivers will generally listen to me. And self-driving vehicles must as well.

Note that when I am doing traffic direction with appropriate authority, most drivers will never have heard of the organization I'm a part of (a local CERT team), nor have any real way to vet the authority I have. The authority they can determine I have is mostly that I'm doing it and no police officer has come by to tell me to stop doing it.

(Note that CERT members do not and should not self-deploy, mind you, and if you choose not to heed our directions, we almost certainly can find a cop car to come let you know you screwed up.)

Also bear in mind, many people directing traffic aren't public safety personnel at all. Construction workers are private employees, events have their own staff which direct traffic in various contexts, including public roads.

There's no definitive way to determine that someone is authorized to direct traffic, cars just need to obey them.

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

#58

Post by zimpenfish »

buzzert wrote: post #28
a4isms wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

I really believe that with that attitude, we'll never be "ready" for driverless cars. > 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. How about, we're trying to make transportation cheaper for everyone by eliminating the most expensive…

> Before you mention public transportation, realize that it would benefit from driverless technologies as well

Which has been in place for years in some places (ie Docklands Light Railway).

> we're trying to make transportation cheaper for everyone

Call me an old cynic but I'll believe it when I see it - I'm old enough to have seen many, many events where the supply cost of something has gone down but the consumer cost has not (or even gone up in some cases.) Why will driverless taxis be any different?

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

#59

Post by neuralRiot »

redtriumph wrote: post #20
retrac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing that is often overlooked is that software can only understand what it was trained to understand.

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

#60

Post by mnd999 »

stingrae wrote: post #33
a4isms wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

As a pedestrian and cyclist in San Francisco, I find driverless cars to be much safer than the average car driver. They follow the rules and are always paying attention.

That’s great, but it apparently wasn’t the case here and that’s the whole point of the article
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