Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 331 posts

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

#71

Post by bmitc »

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…

It's not an attitude. It's reality. Self-driving cars, if even attainable (which is questionable), don't solve any real problems besides bolstering the want for cars and thus more roads and highways, which are primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. That is, other than creating "cool" jobs and supporting get rich schemes and startups.

If we cared about transportation and climate change, we'd be investing into buses, trams, trains, biking and walking paths, and other such solutions.

The attitude designation belongs with self-driving car enthusiasts, who are perfectly happy throwing out decades of safety research and progress.

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

#72

Post by btbuildem »

I can see how this kind of thing would not be in the self-driving training sets.

But a person standing in the way should cause the vehicle to stop, right? Pedestrian of any kind, including a firefighter in full gear.

It's hard to speculate what happened without knowing the details, but I'm imagining a scenario where someone stood there to block the car's progress, and once they realized it's a dumb robot that will proceed as soon as the path is "clear", they did the next logical thing (which was to smash the robot).

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

#73

Post by btbuildem »

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…

Wouldn't even the sudden drop in pressure be dangerous to the crew manning the hose?

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

#74

Post by LarryMullins »

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

Firefighters don't care about your car windows if you get in their way. Do an image search for "fire hose through car" if you want a good laugh. Park in front of a hydrant and firefighters will smash your windows and put the hose straight through it.

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

#75

Post by zinekeller »

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…

> Before you mention public transportation, realize that it would benefit from driverless technologies as well (aka, not zero sum).

The problems from autonomously operating trains are limited owing to them being a separate, nearly-independent system. Anyways, some parts of the world has fully-autonomous trains with centrally-located operators on bay for overriding if anything unexpected (usually someone jumped into the rails) happens. Airplanes have significant automation built-in (and in theory can even land without input) but at the end of the day we have pilots that can override just in case that an engine became unexpectedly loose or someone on board suffered a heart attack.

The problem with autonomous cars is that a) it's specifically on a mixed-used location and b) often most of the developers want to fully abdicate any control, unlike on other systems where how operators are in standby just something unexpected happens. If both Waymo and Cruise are willing to have an operator-standby system a) might be mitigated. Until I hear that these vehicles are supervised just in case they have encountered something unexpected you will see a lot of similar nuisance issues.

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

#76

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

redtriumph wrote: post #20
retrac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

There's a connected vehicle protocol (DSRC) which broadcasts all kinds of metadata about your vehicle. There was stuff like "transaxle temperature" and "steering angle" in there, if I recall, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't also "emergency flashers engaged".

Perhaps autonomous vehicles should be be sensitive to that field, signaling for manual control when they're too near a vehicle which has it enabled. That way any vehicle--not just the fire department--can create a "human control only" field by activating their emergency flashers. Perhaps emergency vehicles could be recognized such that they create a much larger field.

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

#77

Post by onion2k »

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.

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

#78

Post by krisoft »

redtriumph wrote: post #20
retrac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

> But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one?

You don’t. Bad actors can already pretend to be fireman doing fireman things and direct traffic. Human drivers will also be mislead by that.

What is more, if you have a high viz vest, a hard hat, and more confidence than a garden slug you can also direct trafic. Not legally mind you, but more often than not people will follow your directions. If there is a whole gaggle of fake construction people and they have cones too they can probably re-route a highway.

Whatever is stopping people from causing misschief (too often) by these “powers” doesn’t seem to be different in the case of self driving cars than with human driven cars. In fact the self-driving car is more likely to retain a perfect photographic evidence of the mischief maker’s face than a regular human driver.

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

#79

Post by a4isms »

ctoth wrote: post #30
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…

Just a quick note, as a blind person waiting impatiently for the driverless future, there are other uses for driverless vehicles than just making some random person money.

Absolutely. Also aged people who no longer qualify to drive their own vehicles, people with other disabilities that prevent them from driving under any circumstance, people who have disabilities that permit them to drive with specially modified vehicles but would like to be driven or cannot afford the extra expense...

Yes, there are a lot of very good use cases. And honestly, I have a far less important use case of my own: If I take a taxi (usually when travelling) I just want transportation, I do not want someone chatting me up in an effort to earn a good review/tip because they don't earn enough from driving the route silently to get by.

I just don't want progress lubricated by the blood of people who did not give informed consent to assume the risks.

Post reply on HN