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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

#311

Post by BurningFrog »

williamcotton wrote: post #308
BurningFrog wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking more that I pissed off a cop, and now my car randomly won't start.

Well if I was working on such a system I would definitely want to log every shutdown event on storage in the vehicle itself. It could then be seen what key was used and compared to which officer had been assigned that key for the day at the beginning of their shift. So yes, a pissed off (and stupid) cop could do this, but then you can turn around and go to the press with the information, call up a lawyer, and proceed…

I guess we have different beliefs around how easy it is to fight back against government abuse.

I don't think you just contact a journalist and a lawyer, and things usually work out for the best.

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

#312

Post by williamcotton »

BurningFrog wrote: post #311
williamcotton wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if I was working on such a system I would definitely want to log every shutdown event on storage in the vehicle itself. It could then be seen what key was used and compared to which officer had been assigned that key for the day at the beginning of their shift. So yes, a pissed off (and stupid) cop could do this, but then you can turn around and go to the press with the information, call up a lawyer, and proceed…

I guess we have different beliefs around how easy it is to fight back against government abuse. I don't think you just contact a journalist and a lawyer, and things usually work out for the best.

As predicted, some unrelated critique on policing in general that has nothing to do with what we're talking about...

The problem with your line of reasoning is that you really have a problem with government abuse and that you're looking for anything that could possibly add to government abuse even in the smallest of manners. There's no scalar to your concept of abusive systems, just the fact that any system that could be used for government abuse is bad.

It leaves out the intent and capabilities of the government to engage in any kind of abuse.

If the government wanted to silence you then it would silence you like they would in any authoritarian nation: showing up to your front door, putting a bag over your head, and taking you away. They don't need any advanced technology to do so. Technologies are not the main cause authoritarianism. People are the main cause. Technologies can facilitate authoritarianism or they can facilitate liberal democratic republics.

Can a system of warranted entry on private property be abused so that police can enter your house in an unjust manner? Of course! But the presence of a system of warranted entry on private property does not correlate to the authoritarian government.

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

#313

Post by [deleted] »

alasdair_ wrote: post #302
jalk wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the way we define intelligence is such that if we find or invent something that combats human intelligence we immediately redefine it to exclude that aspect. And what makes you so sure the opposite won't happen? E.g. GAI will be achieved earlier by excluding some aspect of human intelligence that some people deem essential. The whole "problem" is that we can't agree on what constitutes intelligence. I predict that…

>I predict that it won't be long before AI systems can score 200 on standard IQ tests. I don't know of a "standard" iq test that goes past 160 or so.

[deleted]

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

#314

Post by mindcrime »

heleninboodler wrote: post #218
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…

Interesting. A couple months ago, there were firefighters at my condo complex running a hose across the driveway into the building. I got past just before they ran the hose, but I stopped and asked them if they would be gone by the time I returned in about 30m, and they said "probably not, but if we're here you can just drive over the hose." That surprised me.

Yeah, that would surprise me as well. I can think of a couple of possible explanations:

- You were talking to somebody really young and inexperienced, who did not themselves realize the risk of letting somebody drive over hose.

- You were talking to a prototypical "world-weary, crusty old greybeard" who was so jaded and cynical that they were thinking to themselves: "It doesn't matter what I say, this person is going to drive over my hose anyway."

- They did in fact have the ramps, that @fukawi2 mentioned, deployed. Hose ramps do make if somewhat reasonable to drive over hose, but they are rarely deployed in my experience.

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

#315

Post by psychomugs »

bmitc wrote: post #230
psychomugs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of this attitude as well, that the Jevon's paradox would kick in for cars again and lead to more use, like how ride-hailing apps worsened congestion.

Agreed. And thank you for the reference to Jevon's paradox. I haven't heard of it before, but I've been looking for things like this.

I've recently been listening to some talks from Matthew Crawford and his arguments for protecting manual, human tasks from automation and safetyism. I find his stance to be a good middle ground between technocratic progress and luddite wariness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxONOUwOX80

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

#316

Post by ulizzle »

j16sdiz wrote: post #227
colechristensen wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The fact that some humans are drunks or psychopaths does not mean that AI mistakes are going to just be accepted. We send people to prison when they make those kinds of mistakes, what do we do when machine learning models kill while functioning entirely normally?

Send a low level engineer to prison, of course.

That's actually not as wild as you think, because that's what happens when a building or bridge falls. The contractor that built the bridge, just like the company that designed it, the agency responsible for inspections and maintenance, etc, is also liable for damages, including prison if it's deemed so by the courts.

Of course, software engineers get treated with kid's gloves, otherwise, everyone just freaks out and cries and cries, because their robotic utopia dreams are meaningless nonsense.

Apparently, smart enough to code, but not smart enough to take responsibility for their actions.

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

#317

Post by BenjiWiebe »

rcpt wrote: post #197
hmry wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what meaning of "active firefighting" you're thinking of that doesn't involve fire, but you can open the PDF linked in the article and see "On January 21, 2023, a similar incident occurred. San Francisco Fire Department Staff were on duty at the scene of a fire on Hayes Street near the intersection with Divisadero Street."

I don't know either but would not be surprised if for some non-fire reason they were plugging in a hose. I don't know why firetrucks show up on medical 911 calls or why fire departments run the lifeguards. But they do all those non-fire things and even more.

As a volunteer firefighter I'd be surprised if they pulled a line when there's no fire. Cleaning up the line is hard work and not something we do for fun.

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

#318

Post by BurningFrog »

williamcotton wrote: post #312
BurningFrog wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we have different beliefs around how easy it is to fight back against government abuse. I don't think you just contact a journalist and a lawyer, and things usually work out for the best.

As predicted, some unrelated critique on policing in general that has nothing to do with what we're talking about... The problem with your line of reasoning is that you really have a problem with government abuse and that you're looking for anything that could possibly add to government abuse even in the smallest of manners. There's no scalar to your concept of abusive systems, just the fact that any system that coul…

This is mostly a critique of an imagined version of my state of mind.

Such discussions are pointless to me.

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

#319

Post by runarberg »

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #304
chongli wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This assumes we don't use anything but transistor scaling for the next 30 years in mobile computing.

Even if we find a novel semiconductor that can scale 1000x better then silicon transistors (say DNA semiconductors), then we are still limited by classical computing. Meaning our most intelligent systems are still just good old statistical inference (I say still, but statistical inference is really powerful, and getting 1000s of orders of magnitude better at statistical inference means a world of amazing discoveries).

Perhaps quantum computing will enable new kinds of inference, then we will need to scale superconductors like we did transistors in the past 75 years, that is possible (not in the next 10-15 years though; 30-40 years is more realistic). However I don’t think this will lead to anything more then amazing statistical inference. People theorized artificial neural networks way back in the 1940s and we already had algorithms for it in the 1970s. I’m not aware of any algorithms, not even theoretical ones that gives us AGI, on any computing device (not even quantum computers).

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

#320

Post by williamcotton »

BurningFrog wrote: post #318
williamcotton wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As predicted, some unrelated critique on policing in general that has nothing to do with what we're talking about... The problem with your line of reasoning is that you really have a problem with government abuse and that you're looking for anything that could possibly add to government abuse even in the smallest of manners. There's no scalar to your concept of abusive systems, just the fact that any system that coul…

This is mostly a critique of an imagined version of my state of mind. Such discussions are pointless to me.

Eh, not really... this is the only paragraph where imagining your "state of mind" might come into play:

The problem with your line of reasoning is that you really have a problem with government abuse and that you're looking for anything that could possibly add to government abuse even in the smallest of manners. There's no scalar to your concept of abusive systems, just the fact that any system that could be used for government abuse is bad.

But I'm not imagining anything because you've made it clear that your problem all along was with government abuse. It's also clear that you're looking for anything that could possibly add to government abuse even in the smallest manners because you don't talk about scale or likelihood, just a simple binary of "could be used for government abuse" or not.

I'm just logically filling in the blanks based on our interaction to come up with how you reasoned your way through all of this.

And I just went back and realized you started talking about personal cars and not taxis... what kind of cop is going to get mad at you and then... wait for you to get a cab, follow you, and then make your car pull over... and then what? Why are they doing this? Why would anyone do this?

I mean, what system is more likely to be abused, one where cops can get a warrant to kick your door down or one where cops can make autonomous taxis pull safely over to the side?

Stop being silly!

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