Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by buzzert » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:20 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #224

buzzert wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cars and thus more roads and highways, which are primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions No… they are _not_ the primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Road transport accounts for less than 12% of emissions[0]. What does climate change have to do with driverless cars anyway? It seems like you're basically saying we should keep driving miserable under some false pretense that it's responsible for…

I didn't say the primary. They are indeed major contributors. I probably should have spelled out the point more, but building roads is the real problem. And so anything that supports building more and thus having to maintain more roads is a problem. If I remember the stat off the top of my head, building just 1-mile of road (I forget the definition of "road") is about as much as a single EV. > It seems like you're ba…

> they aren't solving any real problem, and they will increase problems of congestion and also climate change, since they will continue to bolster cars and thus roads needed to support cars.

Again, this is zero sum thinking. We can have both efficient and safe driverless EVs as well as trains/buses run by the government. Personally, I'd prefer to take the former given how little interest the government has in enforcing laws on public transportation, and this trend seems undue to change.

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

#232

Post by nerdbert » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #65

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?

I think the point is that humans do make this judgement call. We know what a real emergency vehicle and what real emergency personnel looks like, and we know what a crazy person waving their arms looks like. When some idiot in the opposing lanes is waving for me to take a left across multiple lanes of moving traffic, I know that I should ignore their idiotic traffic direction. I know that when there's an emergency si…

I hope you're not suggesting like a hater that a Tesla with FSD (available next week, I promise) isn't capable of performing a snap psych eval of any random person standing at the side of the road.

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

#233

Post by chongli » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

concordDance wrote: post #225

colechristensen wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's no stage at which you trust such an entity with something like driving until it wants a robot to drive it's car so it can do other things than focus on driving. In the same way you don't trust a 5 year old with a loaded gun, you don't trust real synthetic intelligence with something like driving you safely. Not until it reaches the level where it wants equal rights, suffrage, and generally to be treat…

I don't get why people think intelligence requires things like a desire for suffrage... There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Heck, even counting votes would be quite impossible (how much divergence does a copy need before it gets its own vote? What it not all modules/nodes are copied?). Also, the anti-suffrage women seem to have been…

There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals.

Because driving requires the ability to understand what other drivers are doing. It requires a theory of mind, which means understanding human goals.

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

#234

Post by nerdbert » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:25 AM UTC

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

There are going to be times when someone is legitimately responding to an emergency and doesn't have a stop sign handy.

And there are going to be a lot of pranksters who do, and will use them to mess with so-called self-driving cars.

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

#235

Post by j16sdiz » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:26 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #77

crazygringo wrote: post #24

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason -- making way for ambulances, stopping for firefighters, being pulled over for a faulty headlight. Surely Cruise and Waymo have thought about this. Curious how it's supposed to work normally, and whether something about it failed in this case? How is an official supposed to get a moving autonomous vehicle to stop or…

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.

> someone impersonating a cop

A RFID tag would do. If you prefer going dystopia, a chip implant.

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

#236

Post by chongli » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:26 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #211

runarberg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GAI is a pipe dream. There is no technology that we can even conceive—let alone build in the next 10-15 years—of which passes as GAI. Our current AI is based on statistical inference, GAI will need to be able to do far more than infer from data and interpolate actions. No we will never have GAI. --- I know never is a long time, but I can comfortably predict this because there is not only technological problems with G…

The question of if an AI can be regarded as a sentient being has already been debated ad nauseam in science fiction (e.g. Data in Star Trek). All that's needed is someone to achieve GAI at a supercomputer level. From then on, it's just a matter of scaling it down. Your iPhone has more compute power than a supercomputer 30 years ago, after all. And what's also a way to "cheat" is fusing computers and organic matter. B…

Your iPhone has more compute power than a supercomputer 30 years ago, after all.

In 30 years we will not have an iPhone-sized device with the power of today's supercomputers. Transistor scaling is in its final stages. We'll be lucky to get 2-3 more process nodes and that'll be it.

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

#237

Post by buzzert » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:26 AM UTC

a4isms wrote: post #67

buzzert wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I really believe that with that attitude, we'll never be "ready" for driverless cars. Is that a problem? And if it is, are you implying that we cannot one day have driverless cars without imposing life-threatening externalities on citizens who did not give informed consent to participate in the testing of driverless cars?

> And if it is, are you implying that we cannot one day have driverless cars without imposing life-threatening externalities on citizens who did not give informed consent to participate in the testing of driverless cars?

I'd much rather be around a driverless car today, which drives overly cautious and comes to a complete stop at every stop sign, than a car driven by a human driver. So that's my "informed consent", and I suspect many others agree. Is that how democracy works?

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

#238

Post by williamcotton » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:28 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #189

lazyasciiart wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother and his teenage friends redirected traffic into their school grounds to prove that they could do it. They also passed all 'sure, looks legit' tests.

Humans aren’t perfect, but their BS detectors are better than nothing. The more important test scenarios are life threatening or unreasonably disruptive situations rather than harmless pranks.

PKE transmitters given to firefighters with some mechanism to cycle private keys on autodriving taxis weekly.

Nowhere near perfect, but that makes it a lot harder than just getting a spike strip or a hand gun or a demolition derby car. We’re talking about people willing to risk a decade in prison to “do criminal things to a car and/or passengers”. How much work do you think they want to put into disabling a car with a remote? Why not just wave a gun in the driver’s face at a stop light?

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

#239

Post by thereisnospork » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:28 AM UTC

freitzkriesler wrote: post #208

thereisnospork wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Medicines and self driving cars can cause irreperable damage on a larger scale than a shoe does. Don't be a fool - irreparable harm is occurring and you and people like you are standing in the way of fixing it. The current state of the art kills 40,000 people a year.[0] You've got to consider the bigger picture around 'dangerous'. Skepticism here isn't prudent, isn't reasonable, and frankly will be responsible for t…

I bet you like to run untested alpha builds in production environments too. Be my guest and risk killing yourself by beta testing dangerous self driving vehicles and medical procedures that haven't gone through their trials. I risk nothing by not participating. Just do us all a favor and try not to take out others For Science™. Enjoy doing someone else's QC for free.

>I risk nothing by not participating.

But you do, not participating has opportunity risk. It's an elementary CBA - give or take 40 thousand people will die, which could include either or both of us, for every year of delay in self-driving. Be it for 'prudent', 'common-sense' trials or otherwise.

It's scary as hell[0] that there are otherwise smart people who don't see the car-shaped gun already pointed at them just because it has grown familiar.

[0]Because that line of thinking will cost tens of thousands of lives.

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

#240

Post by linsomniac » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:29 AM UTC

Clarification, as there are comments saying otherwise:

Article says Jan 2023 incident was active fire fighting and June 2022 was an active fire scene. Additionally that running over hoses is a violation of CA vehicle codes and "can possibly injure firefighters".