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

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

#111

Post by sofixa »

LarryMullins wrote: post #82
upwardbound wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - faking an emergency is highly frowned upon and I'm betting it's a crime in most places. There's even a similarity with the following aspect of the Geneva Convention, which is that pretending to surrender is so harmful to norms that it is literally a war crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy "In the context of war, perfidy is a form of deception in which one side promises to act in good faith (such as…

I saw a video showing perfidy committed by a Russian soldier in Ukraine. Several Russians were coming out of a building surrendering to some Ukrainian soldiers, when one of them came out with a gun and started shooting. All the Russians were killed in the subsequent firefight, because one of them ruined it for the rest. It may seem like a clever ruse in movies, but in real life it gets people killed.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so terrible. At this point it would be easier to list the war crimes not committed by the Russian army, they seem to be well intent on speed running the Geneva convention. One can only hope one day there's trials in e.g. The Hague to bring all war criminals to justice.

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

#112

Post by robocat »

guardiangod wrote: post #103

Cant the driver-less car, when it sees a fire truck, automatically stop the car at a safe location? Then if the fire truck did not move after 3 minutes, re-route to get away from the fire truck?

Next headlines:

Driverless cars cause traffic jam at accident scene.

Driverless cars cause traffic jam while tenders waiting at traffic lights.

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

#113

Post by klyrs »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #99
onion2k wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason. In that case it would also need to tell the difference between a cop and someone impersonating a cop, or it's going to be really easy to mess with self-driving cars.

Doesn't seem fair to expect self driving vehicles to perform a task that humans can't. It's easy to impersonate a cop and interfere with traffic, and human drivers would be tricked too.

> Doesn't seem fair to expect self driving vehicles to perform a task that humans can't.

That is literally the sales pitch. They're supposed to be better at driving than humans. And that actually means all of it, not just lane-keeping on well marked brightly lit highways.

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

#114

Post by cj »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #27
__s wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw on a reflective vest & you'll have no problem pranking human drivers with your traffic signals

A surprising number of humans have no problem with doing things to faceless computers and public or corporate infrastructure that they would never do to another human being with whom they were making eye contact. Few are willing to don the reflective vest and ruin someone's day by lying to their face and directing them down a bad detour, but I have no problem believing that a lot of people would laugh at a stupid sel…

Isn't the idea that there would be humans in the self-driving car? At least 90% of the time, I would hope.

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

#115

Post by kube-system »

ecnahc515 wrote: post #108
kube-system wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers are smart, and will generally judge your appearance, confidence, and context to determine whether or not your actions are legitimate. And you likely always pass these tests. Imagine a teenager, dressed in street wear, who jumps into the middle of a street to stop traffic in a way that has no explanation given the scene, while their friends laugh on the sidewalk as they observe. Or a group of men in mask…

In basically every example you gave, you still have to stop until people move though. The result is the same, despite everything else. The only one that's a bit iffy is if you're being carjacked, is a bit of an exception. Legitimacy isn't really the problem, it's the circumstance of a human being in front of your car that prevents you from moving forward, and beyond getting out of your car and talking to them, or jus…

Those were two examples, but they're not exhaustive. Traffic direction can (and often does) happen without someone blocking the vehicle.

In the case of an illegitimate request, a human driver might question the request and take a different action instead.

Are you being directed to run a red light? If you judge that someone is maliciously asking you to do so, you probably will choose to remain still instead.

Are you being directed to stop? If you judge that someone is maliciously asking you to do so, you may choose to turn around, reverse, turn into a parking lot or otherwise remove your vehicle from the situation. You don't have to run people over to refuse a command to stop.

And if you were completely blocked from moving, you'd probably call the police.

My point is that "always follow hand signals" is trivially problematic. I would expect that if self-driving cars followed any hand signal they saw, you'd see kids doing it for the lulz on the sidewalk in front of their school. ..."traffic jam challenge". After all, someone is less likely to act maliciously towards a human than they are a machine.

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

#116

Post by palijer »

alexfromapex wrote: post #47

This is going to slowly evolve into "law enforcement needs a killswitch" which is a scary thought

Don't they already have a kill switch in the fact that they have the authority to stop vehicles?

Or us the scary thought that it would be software/hardware and therefore insecure?

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

#117

Post by gambiting »

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…

>>How about, we're trying to make transportation cheaper for everyone by eliminating the most expensive part of taxi cabs (human labor)?

Does anyone really believe that? Right now I could commute to work by taking an Uber - it costs about £10 for a one way trip.

Now you're telling me that a company somewhere, would send a state of the art car equipped with incredibly advanced computers and sensors, car which they need to insure, which needs constant communication and backup emergency controls ready on standby, for which they need to cover maintenance, depreciation and other costs, and would charge me less than £10 for the priviledge? How little exactly?

It's nonsense, that's what it is. Human taxis have pretty much reached the bottom of pricing through gig economy - you are hardly paying for maintenance and fuel at this point with the way rides are structured. What sort of possible margin is there for self driving taxis, which will inevitably end up being incredibly expensive assets until the technology becomes common place and cheaper?

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

#118

Post by jacquesm »

upwardbound wrote: post #45
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?

Agreed - faking an emergency is highly frowned upon and I'm betting it's a crime in most places. There's even a similarity with the following aspect of the Geneva Convention, which is that pretending to surrender is so harmful to norms that it is literally a war crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy "In the context of war, perfidy is a form of deception in which one side promises to act in good faith (such as…

The number of criminals faking medical emergencies to avoid having to appear in court is pretty high. And of course three days after they're right as rain. It's hard to act against because of the risk of punishing someone that really needs it.

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

#119

Post by ykl »

mattlondon wrote: post #95
ghaff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah I would.

You will at a minimum get a ticket and very likely you will get your car smashed by some very angry firefighters / police. If you rupture the hose, you will also get an extremely expensive bill to replace the hose. If the hoses catches or the water pressure drop screws up something on the firefighting side or results in injury or other damage, you'll be held liable for that too.

California Vehicle Code § 21708: "No person shall drive or propel any vehicle or conveyance upon, over, or across, or in any manner damage any fire hose or chemical hose used by or under the supervision and control of any organized fire department."

I dunno man, that's an enormous amount of downside to take in exchange for avoiding the minor inconvenience of just finding a detour so as to not drive over the hose.

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

#120

Post by bsder »

mindcrime wrote: post #2

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…

> And sadly, humans do this all too often anyway.

This is actually probably one of the best arguments for self-driving cars.

The self-driving cars will eventually stop doing this. Humans, never.

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