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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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world, only in controlled environments. After a series of accidents passes the unforgivable threshold, certain levels of autonomous driving will be banned completely.

Maybe I'm too optimistic about self driving but it seems that a fail-safe default of "upon encountering an active emergency situation, stop at a reasonable distance away" is good enough and better than what a significant minority of human drivers do.

Who are the significant minority?

This is the same claim always given by the A.I boosters. Who sees firefighters fighting a fire and decides to just plow through and make matters worse?

Because by "significant minority" what you are saying is that 2 or 3 out of 10 human drivers do this.

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

#162
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, they're supposed to be approximately as good at driving as humans. The whole "sales pitch" is that it doesn't take any human effort to do.

> supposed to be approximately as good at driving as humans

They're supposed to be cheaper. Being as good is the limiting factor. Being cheaper is the pitch.

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

#163
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure they meant faking being a ambulance or a firefighter or a cop to rob someone.

Ah sorry, misinterpretation on my end. You are probably right.

But: fake cops robbing people is pretty common too. Unfortunately.

Even more unfortunate, real cops doing it also happens.

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

#164

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.

Do you have a bulletproof car that can effectively protect the driver? Or are you just imagining Mad Max?

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

#166
post #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 y…

"ordinary software" also gets people killed and injured

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

#167
post #31

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?

self driving car AI challenge, run into the cross walk and start waving every car through

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

#169

Earlier 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.…

> 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 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.

Isn't it the vehicle operators operating the vehicles while ignoring that there are things that the vehicles must do in certain scenarios to be suitable for operation?

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

#170

Earlier 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.…

> 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 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.

So there's no monolithic entity that handles public safety in any given area. Overlapping jurisdictions of police, fire, public works, utility companies, construction companies, volunteer orgs, etc. all will end up on the streets for different reasons.

If self-driving cars cannot cope with this, they should not be allowed on public roads. Very little has convinced me they should currently be street legal.

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