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…
Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
141–150 of 331 posts
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#142Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#143Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#144This is going to slowly evolve into "law enforcement needs a killswitch" which is a scary thought
Right now law enforcement already has a "killswitch": a traffic stop. If you don't stop at the traffic stop, the "killswitch" is a chase & spikes on the road.
A "killswitch" in which someone can just have the car pull-over seems like objectively safer.
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Reading between the lines it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of communication to emergency services etc on how to deal with autonomous vehicles.
Even the police seem to be operating under misconceptions about what the vehicles can and can’t do.
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#147Earlier 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…
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
#148Earlier 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…
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
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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…
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#150Earlier 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?