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

Autonomous vehicles

[ichthus]

What the hell are they going to do when we're all in autonomous vehicles that always obey the speed limit and their revenue stream dries up?

(Actually, I don't even think we'll need speed limits once autonomous cars are commonplace -- at least, not on highways)

Re:GASP we break the law all the time and no one d

[Anonymous Coward]

ng above the limit by 15% on a nice, dry, sunny summer day isn't as bad as being 15% above on a snowy/icey winter morning/evening.

Except, it's not safe to pull cars over in the rain or heavy traffic, so you only get speeding tickets when it's perfectly safe to speed. Sadly, I don't believe ticketing and safety have anything to do with each other any more. Personally, I'd love to see some ticketing for lack of turn signals, failure to yield and tail gating. Then again, I'd like to see the cops start obeying those laws.

Re:Just set it to clock speed

[CrimsonAvenger]

you are ticketed for speeding because someone somewhere has deemed that speed unsafe to yourself and/or others in that location.

Or because the cop in question needs a few more tickets issued to make his quota.

Or perhaps the area is a "speed trap".

If ALL speedlimits were based on safety requirements ONLY, there's not be all that much speeding. As witnessed by the fact that virtually everyone speeds, and yet the carnage level on the roads is mostly based on the alcohol content of the drivers. Or the features on their phones....