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Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

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Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

cakedoggie wrote: post #49
djyaz1200 wrote: post #7

Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. Even though autonomous cars will be (and Tesla argues already are) safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public. The industry will become even more heavily regulated, and t…

Maybe. But cars seem to get a free pass with regulation, since they kill about 1.3 million people a year. We have all pretty much decided that this is acceptable, and having something traveling at 50 miles an hour a few feet from where you are walking is ok.

One has to wonder, how much longer - given that trucks are becoming the new favourite tool of mass murderers.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#82

Post by deafcalculus »

Judgmentality wrote: post #43
Animats wrote: post #41

There's considerable wishful thinking about autonomous cars. Not about the technology; that's coming along fine. (I used to work on that stuff.) About the business possibilities. There's a fantasy that there's a high-margin business opportunity in there somewhere. The most likely outcome in the near term is that self-driving is an auto accessory you can order for a car. That's what the car-makers have in mind, and mo…

> There's a lot of noise about "transportation as a service". Remember that Uber loses money, even after squeezing its drivers really hard and making them buy and maintain the cars. Uber loses money because it pays the drivers - if you eliminate the driver you eliminate most of the cost. And if you can use simpler electric vehicles which are cheaper to drive and maintain, then you have yet another significant advanta…

Eliminate the driver and Uber loses the already weak marketplace network effect. Why would a taxi fleet service come to Uber rather than having their own app?

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#83

Post by Eridrus »

salt-licker wrote: post #40

This write-up overlooks that hardware integration is neither free nor easy. Tesla has a huge advantage over an 'autonomy in a box' model because 1. It only has to support 2 or 3 car models and 2. It has full control over all design decisions. Imagine trying to calibrate your third-party self-driving software for every different car geometry, sensor placement, transmission system, and steering sensitivity across a few…

> Now let's say waymo chooses a sole partner to avoid this, GM, for example.

I think it depends a lot on the specific partner. Noticeably WayMo has partnered with Chrysler, rather than Ford, and Chrysler seems in a position where they would retool to do what WayMo told them to do, because they have no self-driving effort of their own, so WayMo is their only hope if this becomes real. WayMo might just buy Chrysler at that point.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#84

Post by Eridrus »

mabbo wrote: post #29

One way to help prevent a winner-take-all situation is to have more open protocols for some of the hard problems. An example that I feel needs to be done right now: an open protocol for signaling intent. Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich…

I wonder if typical car manufacturers who sell cars to other people will really be able to capture this data, technologically speaking.

It's way too much data to send over LTE, so you need to have a bunch of disk space to store it, and then you need your users to be OK with you abusing their WiFi in the middle of the night to send gigabytes of data back, which they won't, because we have data caps.

Whereas if you operate a fleet, you can just connect a data transfer cable to the car every night and dump all the data.

Obviously you can compress the data; maybe throw away the vision and point cloud data, and just keep the object locations, but is control with already recognised objects the real problem here, or is it the actual recognition part?

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#85

Post by putsteadywere »

amelius wrote: post #80
djyaz1200 wrote: post #7

Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. Even though autonomous cars will be (and Tesla argues already are) safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public. The industry will become even more heavily regulated, and t…

> Even though autonomous cars will be safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public. Of course. If somebody is a much-better-than-average driver, then suddenly their probability of getting killed is going to be equalized with the rest of the population and may become higher as a result.

Worse yet - due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the average driver is confident that they are much better than average.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#86

Post by putsteadywere »

microcolonel wrote: post #5
olivermarks wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Made me think of Michael Hastings demise... https://youtu.be/7zakBULPETo

The real point is that it is possible. Any specific suspicious death may come and go, but the fact that something like this is believable with conventional networked cars is enough reason to be very skeptical of security and government access (and criminal access) claims of manufacturers, no matter how well-meaning.

If I had a level 5 autonomous car that was compromised by someone who wanted to kill me, they probably could. Or they could just push me down a flight of stairs.

Ultimately, I am alive because nobody cares enough to murder me.

https://www.xkcd.com/538/

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#87

Post by microcolonel »

putsteadywere wrote: post #86
microcolonel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real point is that it is possible. Any specific suspicious death may come and go, but the fact that something like this is believable with conventional networked cars is enough reason to be very skeptical of security and government access (and criminal access) claims of manufacturers, no matter how well-meaning.

If I had a level 5 autonomous car that was compromised by someone who wanted to kill me, they probably could. Or they could just push me down a flight of stairs. Ultimately, I am alive because nobody cares enough to murder me. https://www.xkcd.com/538/

"Why lock my door, people will open the door if they want to, or break the window."

I don't see what's wrong with having fewer things in your life which can silently kill you.

If you get in a new car, you are now completely at its mercy. There are few or no precautions you can take; you might as well lay on your back, and strap your arms down so your belly stays up.

What you're really doing is making it cheaper and easier to kill, misdirect, or trick you. This means that people who wanted to do these things before, but couldn't afford it, now can.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#88

Post by d0lph »

deafcalculus wrote: post #82
Judgmentality wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a lot of noise about "transportation as a service". Remember that Uber loses money, even after squeezing its drivers really hard and making them buy and maintain the cars. Uber loses money because it pays the drivers - if you eliminate the driver you eliminate most of the cost. And if you can use simpler electric vehicles which are cheaper to drive and maintain, then you have yet another significant advanta…

Eliminate the driver and Uber loses the already weak marketplace network effect. Why would a taxi fleet service come to Uber rather than having their own app?

I think still the marketplace is pretty useful, especially if a taxi service is competing with people renting out their autonomous car to uber while they work or aren't using it. It would also be annoying to have to find an app for every city you're traveling in.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#89

Post by colejohnson66 »

icebraining wrote: post #63
sah2ed wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better solution would be to provision each car with its own key pair and the car maker's root CA just before it rolls off the factory floor, that way it can constantly beam 2 signals: - a signed (regulator-mandated) signal for cars from other manufacturers; - an encrypted signal intended for cars from the same manufacturer. The first signal would be signed by the root CA of the car maker to indicate that its commun…

Signed messages only ensure that they weren't modified by a MITM. If the attack controls the sending vehicle, the signature doesn't help.

Tamper proof modules that store the key? Like Secure Enclave?

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#90

Post by ruytlm »

reacweb wrote: post #75
ruytlm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly agree. While reading this article, I had a paranoid convergence of ideas. I was reading another article the other day about stock trading strategies, and how some particular strategies only work if a small number of people are using them; once they go mainstream, they lose their advantage. The example used was a whole lot of funds jumping into a particular strategy, which then effectively killed the strategy's…

Already solved for aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...

Good point. Should have thought of that!
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