Speeding Ticket Robots — Laws As Algorithms

An anonymous reader writes "As the age of autonomous cars and drone surveillance draws nearer, it's reasonable to expect government to increasingly automate enforcement of traffic laws. We already deal with red light cameras, speed limit cameras, and special lane cameras. But they aren't widespread, and there are a host of problems with them. Now, Ars reports on a group of academics who are attempting to solve the problem of converting simple laws to machine-readable code. They found that when the human filter was removed from the system, results became unreasonable very quickly. For example, if you aren't shy about going 5 mph over the limit, you'll likely break the law dozens of times during an hour of city driving. On the freeway, you might break it continuously for an hour. But it's highly unlikely you'd get more than one ticket for either transgression. Not so with computers (PDF): 'An automated system, however, could maintain a continuous flow of samples based on driving behavior and thus issue tickets accordingly. This level of resolution is not possible in manual law enforcement. In our experiment, the programmers were faced with the choice of how to treat many continuous samples all showing speeding behavior. Should each instance of speeding (e.g. a single sample) be treated as a separate offense, or should all consecutive speeding samples be treated as a single offense? Should the duration of time exceeding the speed limit be considered in the severity of the offense?' One of the academics said, 'When you're talking about automated enforcement, all of the enforcement has to be put in before implementation of the law—you have to be able to predict different circumstances.'"

Comments

Re:Reckless driving

[CanHasDIY]

Wrong.

Fuck your "wrong." What, are you one of those egocentric asshats that appoints yourself Lord and Master of the Interstate or something?

P.S. if you're going to tell someone that they're incorrect, explain it. Otherwise you just look like an asshole.

If everyone went 90mph it would be far safer than having one guy going 65 and another going 90 on the same road.

True. Then again, if slow-moving fuckheads would just keep right (as they're supposed to by current law) and not intentionally cut off faster moving traffic, you'd get the same result.

I blame the lack of training requirement, myself - it is way to damn easy to get a driving license in this country, which probably accounts for more accidents than anyone is willing to admit. I mean, think about it - in most states, at the age of 16 you can get a card that lets you legally operate 2+ tons of steel, hurtling at speeds up to 70-80 MPH, by taking a short written test (as many times as you need to pass it), and subsequent short driving test (which, again, can be retaken repeatedly with no penalty).

The point of speed limits is to get everyone going as close as possible to the same speed, then their speed relative to each other is miniscule causing interactions to happen more slowly and less frequenty.

Considering the significant difference between the maximum (70) and minimum speed (45) on the interstate, I find that theory dubious at best; Rent-seeking seems a far more plausible rationale.