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

#241

Post by kortilla » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:32 AM UTC

jcoder wrote: post #110

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.

That sounds like a them problem—society won’t change any practices to accommodate these toys that are demonstrating how little value they bring every day.

Ableism at its finest. If these actually deliver on driverless cars it will be a boon to people who can’t drive. And that completely ignores the value in letting people work while they commute and the reduced loss of life from wrecks.

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

#242

Post by cipheredStones » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:34 AM UTC

morpheos137 wrote: post #140

Are driverless cars are a solution in search of a problem or a problem in search of a solution? I think the latter. The problem is psychological and and the solution is for people to grow up. Technology is no where near the state necessary to navigate the real world, because it has no model of the real world comparable to the human brain. Competent adults who have looked into this problem understand this. The "driver…

> The problem is psychological and the solution is for people to grow up.

To quote a popular Tumblr post, "If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."

Human flaws are not going to go away any time soon, and you probably can't improve the overall quality of human driving on any scale less than decades. Whether or not they're useful right now, driverless cars are promising because the technology improves over time.

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

#243

Post by AlexandrB » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:39 AM UTC

buzzert wrote: post #231

bmitc wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enforci…

> 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.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about HOV lanes and bus lanes not being enforced, fares not being enforced, or literal lawlessness on public transit?

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

#244

Post by AlexandrB » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:41 AM UTC

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)? Transportation being cheaper means people can get better jobs further away from where they live, see family more often, etc.

Is this going to make people's lives better (shorter work week and/or better pay) or worse (longer commute and expectation that you work in your car)?

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

#245

Post by kube-system » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:41 AM UTC

nerdbert wrote: post #232

kube-system wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am suggesting that a car which follows all human gestures is not better than a car that follows no human gestures.

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

#246

Post by runarberg » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:43 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…

GAI is not limited by computing power, but theory. Yes we will be able to make better inference by feeding more data into our models, supervised learning will be able to work with thousands of parameters, etc. This will lead to all sorts of new discoveries in many fields, including biochemistry, astrophysics, neurology, etc. It will also bring us a bunch of new fun toys to play with including better and more capable robots, and it will also lead to better engineered social systems (including traffic engineering; but also public transit, and—yes—self driving vehicles—but we already have self driving trains, so it is not as big of a deal as you think it is).

However this misses my point about AGI. It is not about computing capabilities but theory. AGI will have to evaluate situations that has never arisen before without having data that directly directs it. I don’t see how statistical inference can do that, and as such we will need an entirely new methods of training it. Like I said, we haven’t even conceived how an AGI technology works, there are no algorithms which will work in theory even with unlimited computing power. Contrast this, for example, with quantum computing, which has a bunch of algorithms demonstrating it’s capabilities. With AGI all we have is “perhaps our cars become better at driving them selves”. I’m not buying it.

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

#247

Post by CamperBob2 » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:43 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #55

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?

Why shouldn't I, if it's not illegal to do so? If it's a bad thing to do, it would say so in my state's driver's handbook, wouldn't it?

In reality, yes, I'd back up and find another way, if the hose appeared to be in use fighting a fire. I wouldn't want to cut off the water even momentarily. But that falls into the category of "Not being a dick behind the wheel," rather than the category of "Obeying the law." If we don't want this to happen with self-driving cars, then we need to change the law.

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

#248

Post by morpheos137 » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:46 AM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #206

colechristensen wrote: post #87

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.

I donno the robots in terminator seemed to have some self awareness. Why can’t we apply the same to cars?

Your comment, I am not sure if intentionally, encapsulates what is really going on with self driving cars. I.e. people assume fantasy or fiction can become reality with enough effort. This is not always true...

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

#249

Post by williamcotton » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:46 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #154

flaque wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why this is that scary of a 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.

Once there is a killswitch, it can be accessed by people and purposes it wasn't intended for.

Think this through. Like, really, think this through.

What’s the goal? You want to steel a car? Rob the passengers? Kidnap the passengers? Kill the passengers?

So what are your options in this world where there is the equivalent of a firefighters key in elevator, but probably using PKE and periodic private key cycling?

Steal a key? From where? Buy one? From who and for how much? Ok, so now you’re needing to commit some rather risky crimes before you even move onto the next step.

And then let’s say you get the key. So you disable a taxi. And then what? I assume the passengers can lock the doors. So you smash the window open and, well, maybe it’s best to have a gun…

But why not just get a gun and approach someone stuck at a red light?

Why kind of risk/reward calculus is going on inside the mind of the criminal deciding to forcibly stop a moving vehicle and rob or murder the passengers?

So yes, what you said is true, but the likelihood is very low and the benefit to emergency responders is high.

I guess it makes for a good plot device for a spy movie.

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

#250

Post by KRAKRISMOTT » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:50 AM UTC

retrac wrote: post #12

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…

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,…

Simple, just transfer control over to a remote operator. We already do this for delivery rovers (see e.g. LA's coco rovers). Not an impossible problem unless all communication infrastructure is down (solar storm, hurricane, that sort of thing).