This is going to slowly evolve into "law enforcement needs a killswitch" which is a scary thought
IoT killswitch, outsourced to a private outfit, is scary.
Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
191–200 of 331 posts
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There's no definitive way to determine that someone is authorized to direct traffic, cars just need to obey them. Exactly! But there still is a way. You don't obey anyone in any circumstances because that would be dangerous. People have a feeling for it, computers don't yet.
I'd obey such traffic commands from just about anybody in plain street clothes, unless they looked obviously crazy or if I was in part of the world where car jacking is common. At the very least I'd stop and ask them what was up. Maybe there is some dangerous condition ahead and they're trying to warn me. Does the computerized car understand the meaning of the words "Turn back because the bridge is out" ?
I bet you’d eyeball it though, right? Like if someone was telling cars to stop, looked nervous, and had a hand in a large enough pocket to hold a gun, I might head in the direction they were sending people (depending on visibility I guess) but I’d probably not slow down.
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed - faking an emergency is highly frowned upon and I'm betting it's a crime in most places. There's even a similarity with the following aspect of the Geneva Convention, which is that pretending to surrender is so harmful to norms that it is literally a war crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy "In the context of war, perfidy is a form of deception in which one side promises to act in good faith (such as…
I saw a video showing perfidy committed by a Russian soldier in Ukraine. Several Russians were coming out of a building surrendering to some Ukrainian soldiers, when one of them came out with a gun and started shooting. All the Russians were killed in the subsequent firefight, because one of them ruined it for the rest. It may seem like a clever ruse in movies, but in real life it gets people killed.
> It may seem like a clever ruse in movies, but in real life it gets people killed.
To be fair, the point of the ruse (in real wars; in heroic fiction this sometimes varies) is usually to get people killed, too; the question is just which people get killed.
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#194Less 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…
Just saying, as another firefighter, this post above is fantastic. To add: a vehicle driving over a hose also means a vehicle is likely to be “in” the scene operating area. Random cars where we don’t expect them can lead to all sorts of injury. Granted, as a truck comp guy, I often had to deal with engine guys not leaving room - but first due is first due. ;)
"Pull past and leave room for the ladder"
Words not heard often enough! :-)
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#195Obviously 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…
There should be a protocol where emergency workers can set up a geofence where cars are not allowed. Driverless cars can automatically avoid the geofence. Drivered cars can pop up an alert.
With that approach let's hope we never run out of bandaids and doubly that it's not a bandaid with a Dino pattern that the car doesn't know.
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#196Aren't they supposed to respond to gestures? What do they do if someone is directing traffic? And I guess the question if they do respond to traffic directing gestures: how do they avoid obvious pranks from drunk people?
I doubt it. That's a really hard problem. Ignoring the machine vision component, if someone on the side of the road waves at their friend, should cars going by stop? Since there's no way to take control of these vehicles, I imagine they fall back to a service center with remote drivers when they come across the unexpected. Anything involving flashy lights should fall into this category.
Waymo supposedly had that as a feature: https://www.pcmag.com/news/waymo-car-ai-obeys-traffic-cop-ha...
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#197Was there actually a fire? > fire hoses on the ground in the area of active firefighting It sounds like there wasn't.
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.
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#198Earlier 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.
It will definitely happen, and likely (>50%) within the next 10-15 years. We need true GAI to do this, of course, and the question is: will a "real" GAI be willing to drive a car? How much will we have to pay it?
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.
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I know never is a long time, but I can comfortably predict this because there is not only technological problems with GAI, but also philosophical problems. 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.
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#199Less 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…
Question, wouldn't it suffice to just put a couple traffic cones in front of it? AVs should be already trained to recognize and stop for those.
Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
To spell it out, if an SDC Taxi stops for anyone waving frantically, how do you prevent robbers and rapists from routinely harvesting their passengers?
Exactly how you stop people from flagging a human driven taxi with plights for help and then robbing or raping the passenger. This doesn't seem like a problem specific to self driving. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1958/
A Taxi has a sober human driver with professional experience to handle such situations.
A piece of software with some cameras and actuators is really not the same.