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What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

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Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#81

Post by vezzy-fnord »

beagle3 wrote: post #79
ewoodrich wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether or not that is true (and full disclosure, I doubt that it is from what I've read) it is surprising to me how something with tenuous evidence can be presumptively believed to be true in certain circles. His own wife says it was a "tragic accident", and his brother says he believed Hastings to be in a "manic episode" at the time. Why is it that random people on the internet have so much more suspi…

I haven't been following the Hastings case, so I can only reply in general: Following the recent Snowden disclosures, you should question yourself at disbelieving conspiracy so easily. You might be right (probably are, for all I know), but you have no reason to believe so other than pure faith. Ask yourself this (and answer truthfully): A year ago - did you believe that the NSA is actively sabotaging standards, inter…

Ask yourself this (and answer truthfully): A year ago - did you believe that the NSA is actively sabotaging standards, intercepting shipments in order to modify the software to be under their control, etc? If you didn't (and I'm sure you've had the conspiracies mentioned), then why on earth would you believe "the official word" on anything like remote control of a car?

I am fucking sick of people being surprised by the NSA revelations.

NSA malpractice has been documented all the way back to 1975 by the Church Committee's papers: http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_c...

Then later on we had Clipper chips, ECHELON, Presidential Surveillance Program, TEMPEST, Total Information Awareness, DCSNet, Room 641A and plenty of other surveillance disclosures.

This whole stigmatization of conspiracy theorists as loons is wholly unfair, misguided and shows the speaker's ignorance of how intelligence agencies operate. Conspiracy theories aren't just idiotic pop culture ravings about Illuminati, reptilian men and ZOG.

Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#82

Post by nightski »

saraid216 wrote: post #72
nightski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time policing costs would decrease dramatically.

That's probably not true. I've gotten the impression that a sizable chunk of police funding comes from speeding tickets. Paying an officer to do something low-risk like camping out next to a road for a shift isn't really expensive. Same with monitoring systems like cameras on traffic lights. Set-up cost is significant, but they probably pay for themselves within a year.

The initial cost doesn't matter. If an officer doesn't cost much, yet you don't have to pay him any more than that is a 100% decrease in cost.

Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?

Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#83

Post by saraid216 »

nightski wrote: post #82
saraid216 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably not true. I've gotten the impression that a sizable chunk of police funding comes from speeding tickets. Paying an officer to do something low-risk like camping out next to a road for a shift isn't really expensive. Same with monitoring systems like cameras on traffic lights. Set-up cost is significant, but they probably pay for themselves within a year.

The initial cost doesn't matter. If an officer doesn't cost much, yet you don't have to pay him any more than that is a 100% decrease in cost. Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?

> Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?

Arguable. It depends on how badly you want [insert autonomous car producer here] to run your local police department from the cloud.

Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#84

Post by maxerickson »

saraid216 wrote: post #83
nightski wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The initial cost doesn't matter. If an officer doesn't cost much, yet you don't have to pay him any more than that is a 100% decrease in cost. Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?

> Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser? Arguable. It depends on how badly you want [insert autonomous car producer here] to run your local police department from the cloud.

I was thinking about this for other reasons (it is beneficial for the auto-car to know about road closures), but a reasonable implementation has the vehicle interpreting rules data provided by the governments where it is operating, so you can do certification by making sure the vehicle 'correctly' interprets a given data set.

Having the rules data provided by the government is a fairly straightforward way for the vehicles to work even after the builder repudiates maintenance (maybe that is better said as 'to continue to work longer after', but whatever).

(I'm not worried about the cloud, hand-wringing and paranoia are going to make these things at least function independently or keep them off the road altogether)

Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#85

Post by greeneggs »

nightski wrote: post #16
drawkbox wrote: post #6

This brings up very interesting ideas and questions that will happen with autonomous cars. Routes and retail along those routes will enter a new era. Building a store you have to take into account algorithms of the vehicles. Slight changes to a widely used system could shut down a business faster than individual human choice (although it may also make other businesses seen more as it distributes traffic across more r…

I don't see any reason to believe why you are in any less control with a autonomous car. If anything, you would be in more control because making that quick decision turn into McDonalds would be as stressful as pushing a button.

You think there's going to be a "McDonalds" button on the dashboard? No, you'll have to press half a dozen buttons to reroute, and so you'll have past the restaurant and won't bother. Whereas currently, your control is direct and immediate.

Although (to argue against myself), why shouldn't there be a display that shows you the upcoming businesses along your route, that you can click on to reroute? Perhaps businesses who pay extra get slightly larger visuals or video ads, or get shown for a larger radius (for example, the default is to show businesses just to the immediate left and right, but pay extra to get shown a block to the left or right). Quick, file a patent. :)

Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#86

Post by greeneggs »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #18

Better yet, would you trade ads and impulse buys for free rides? So you never have to own a car, but every time you go anywhere your car is actively trying to get you to spend time and money doing things you normally wouldn't do -- play online games, visit donut shops, and so on. Would that be worth never having to own a car?

Google's patented this idea; see, e.g., http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/google-patents-ad-pow...

Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#87

Post by im3w1l »

Ambrosia wrote: post #75
TacticalCoder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Here's a simpler one than the "sekrit tech elite" wanting to kill you... What happens when the equivalent of the Mariposa botnet, but this time for autonomous cars, roots 12 million of autonomous cars? But, this time, we have to believe that security is going to be done correctly, right? (this time, promised, no backdoors, no 0-days, no compromised servers, no compromised keys, etc.) I does really hope this t…

oh god, ransomware for your car...

"We are going to kill 100 drivers every day until 1bn in bitcoin is sent to 1...x"

Just imagine the economic disruptions on day 3 when no one dares drive anymore

Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#88

Post by mistercow »

scep12 wrote: post #68
mistercow wrote: post #7

I don't think anyone is going to be dumb enough to try the specific scenario this article outlines. The real world is noisy, and in practice, an objective like "reroute path to include Krispy Kreme, but only if it isn't too far out of the way" is going to have too many edge cases to do 100% reliably. And it only takes one "my car made me 40 minutes late to work by trying to take me by a Krispy Kreme in the next town"…

> an objective like "reroute path to include Krispy Kreme, but only if it isn't too far out of the way" is going to have too many edge cases to do 100% reliably Too many edge cases? I'm sure you would have said the same thing about self-driving cars not too long ago. In a world where cars drive themselves, choosing an alternate route based on traffic and waypoints is a relatively easy problem to solve.

It's a matter of risk vs. reward. The reward for self-driving cars is huge. If it screws up once or twice and makes you late, you don't have a whole lot to complain about. From the developer's point of view, it's not all that embarrassing because it's naturally framed in the context of "yeah, but it's a self-driving car."

But the situation is totally different with advertising. It's not "I was late because my amazing scifi technology malfunctioned"; it's "I was late because of a crummy commercial". The consumer doesn't get any tangible reward for this, so they're just pissed off. And the developer and advertiser end up embarrassed because they did something shady and it screwed someone's day up.

Re: What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?

#90

Post by jack-r-abbit »

greeneggs wrote: post #85
nightski wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any reason to believe why you are in any less control with a autonomous car. If anything, you would be in more control because making that quick decision turn into McDonalds would be as stressful as pushing a button.

You think there's going to be a "McDonalds" button on the dashboard? No, you'll have to press half a dozen buttons to reroute, and so you'll have past the restaurant and won't bother. Whereas currently, your control is direct and immediate. Although (to argue against myself), why shouldn't there be a display that shows you the upcoming businesses along your route, that you can click on to reroute? Perhaps businesses…

I use Waze on my phone for my car nav. When I am stopped, it will often pop up a small advert for something near by (usually offering some sort of deal) with a single button that says something like "Go there". Tapping that button will reroute me. If this was built into the car nav of an autonomous vehicle, I don't see why it would need to be more complicated than what we already have in other apps today.
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