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FBI Concerned About Criminals Using Driverless Cars
gurps_npc (621217) writes As per the Guardian, The FBI is concerned about dirverless cars. It discussed issues such as letting criminals shoot while the car drives (silly in my opinion, apparently they haven't heard of "partners" or considered requiring such cars have a police controlled "slow down" command), the use of such vehicles as guided bullets (safeties again should stop this), and loading it with explosives and using it as a guided missile. This last concern is the only one that I considered a real issue, but even that is not significantly more dangerous than loading up a regular van full of explosives with a timer, then setting the timer to explode before you leave the vehicle next to a school, etc.
Automation is killing jobs faster than we've ever imagined. Even suicide bombers are being rendered useless.
Well, y'know, if the cops can't slow a car down by pushing a button, there are always spike strips...
Obviously the solution is requiring passengers to go through TSA checkpoints before they are able to board or disembark from any driverless car.
But seriously, if these are concerns for driverless cars, they are concerns for regular cars too. It's not improbable to build a working remote-controlled car from any normal model anyways. It's regularly done for stun work, Mythbusters, etc.
Covering one's tracks seems like it would be more difficult depending upon the level of logging used by the cars. That would be a benefit to law enforcement. So this is the beginning of another privacy vs. security debate then, eh?
If the car would not drive without a passenger, that would solve those concerns. That would mean the car needs to be able to detect the presence of it's passenger, but it already has to detect pedestrians, other vehicles, stop lights, signs ...
If somebody had a need for a fleet of unmanned cars (pizza delivery?), they could get a driverless license just as we already have a driver license. Show an actual reason to be sending cars driving around without people and you're good.
This is obviously a ploy to mandate government tracking on driverless cars, which they'll eventually extend to all cars.
They want to track all the data, on every citizen, all the time, in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.
They won't even need a button. I highly doubt an automated car will proceed to pilot itself on a high speed chase, or ignore red and blue lights.
Fbi should go back to consulting their Internet slang dictionary, rather than trying to think.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
A simple motion and heat sensor should prevent passengerless cars carrying bombs. This would effectively make driverless cars with remote slowdown command easier for LEO's to disable than the drivered variety.
As to the specific points raised:
It discussed issues such as letting criminals shoot while the car drives (silly in my opinion, apparently they haven't heard of "partners" or considered requiring such cars have a police controlled "slow down" command),
Slow down command won't mean a thing when the criminals rip out the necessary parts to make it moot or reprogram it to do something - ignore the command, do the opposite, or even blow up the vehicle.
the use of such vehicles as guided bullets (safeties again should stop this), and loading it with explosives and using it as a guided missile. This last concern is the only one that I considered a real issue, but even that is not significantly more dangerous than loading up a regular van full of explosives with a timer, then setting the timer to explode before you leave the vehicle next to a school, etc.
True, aside from it being a "guided" missile - just set a target in the GPS and off it goes....again, the potential is there and criminals won't allow it to stop just because of a "slow down" or "stop" command. They'll figure out a way to override that before using it.
And again, if they really wanted to do it the technology is already out there and nothing is going to stop them from using it if they really wanted to.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
"Due to this threat, we must have the ability to totally control driverless cars... and cars with drivers... and all electronic devices... and we need to track people in real time for the entirety of their lives..."
A shootout with an autodrive car. Sure the criminal could have the car driving to a destination while they hang out the window and shoot. Of course, the car would go the legal speed, stop at all lights and stop signs, and generally be much safer than any car driven by a human, much less one shooting or getting shot at.
Not to mention it will probably have a police override allowing them to remotely either stop it, or redirect it to a place of their choosing. I wouldn't be surprised if it would even tell the police it's intended route and destination if they asked it.
It will also probably have an emergency responder reaction where if there are sirens from police, fire, or ambulance it pulls over to the side and stops, as that is the law for humans. And as the poster mentioned, a partner could always drive a car so the one riding shotgun could still shoot.
Using it for bombings. What's so different from sending an autodrive vehicle to someplace with a bomb in it as opposed to sending a regular vehicle with a bomb and then leaving it before it blows, or even having some ignorant stooge drive it for you? After all, it's not like you can make the autodrive violate it's programming and plow through a crowd or into a mall. If you really wanted to do that, you could just rig a normal car up with remote controls. It's not that hard or expensive, they do it a lot on mythbusters, so it's not a strange concept to most people either.
Of course, the FBI has way too many people that need to deal with technology that really don't understand it in the slightest. Years ago I had to disappoint an FBI agent that I was helping by explaining to him how things really worked. He was getting samples from all the different printers so that they could make a database to identify what printer printed something like they used to do with typewriters. I had to explain to him that the fonts are totally programmable and have no unique characteristics to that printer. Also, that the inks and toners are actually made by only a handful of companies, and are again, not unique to the printer. He was very disappointing with the information.
You mean ground drones?
Car heaven is where the mechanics are German, the drivers are Italian, and the leather is maintained by a British butler.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Or what is car heaven?
Probably any place without drivers.
The future has a bunch of scary possibilities.
At some point, someone's going to figure out that if they tape a gun to a quadcopter, it becomes a very effective way to kill people - especially if you can afford 50 of them and can do some basic automation (ie. float to these GPS coords, then shoot anything that moves). Defense against this kind of threat is problematic.
And yeah, a driverless car would be a good base to build some effective weapons on. You're going to get "drive here" for free. "Keep driving a bit, then blow up" is pretty easy to add on to that. And it requires very little personal commitment to be effective, assuming you're competent in dealing with the software.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Yes, because of past car bombings, it's much harder to park a van in front of somewhere sensitive for even a few minutes. There is definitely a "demand", so to speak, for a remote-control van that wouldn't have to park.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wow, the FBI is so awesome, they can predict exactly what a criminal is gonna do in advance. How about they actually solve a murder, rape, or kidnapping once in a while? 35% of murders don't get solved .. maybe when they get that number down to like 5% I'll start believing the feds when they say it's gonna rain tomorrow. Meanwhile anything to reduce the 30,000 highway deaths per year will be appreciated. If automated cars are illegal, only the federales will have automated cars with a dummy driver.
IF everyone is in an automatic car that obeys all traffic laws all the time, will there be no more traffic tickets?
If an auto ca can drop someone off at the airport then drive back home, what will happen to all the long term parking garages?
If an auto car will find it's own parking space, is that the end of valets?
I for one am happy to see all that crap come to an end.
I think drug dealers would love driverless cars. No one to arrest. You could say the "owner", but much harder to prove.
The thing is that an autonomous car would probably be programmed to follow ALL the traffic laws.
What good is a get-away car that stops at every red/yellow light and yields to pedestrians?
That's not even going into whether the car would pull to the side of the road and stop when it detected emergency vehicle lights/sirens.
All these comments about "well what if the police have a slow down command" or "what if there are safeties" fails to address the FIRST rule of computer security.
Physical security is the first rule.
if you don't have it then your system is not secure.
Physical security is having actual physical possession of the machine. Well, the criminal might have that. Which means all your safeguards and overrides might be shut off or hacked or bypassed.
If I'm a criminal, I can remote control the car and use it as a surface going drone. I don't even have to be in it. I can go on a car stealing spree and fill a garage with dozens of cars. And then all at once send them out onto the road as wingmen to assist in whatever I want to do. They could set up roadblocks all over town... they could ram police cars. They could shield me from pursuit. They could operate as get away cars.
You could do all sorts of stuff.
Saying "but but we could put in an override" is as ignorant as suggesting that you could stop all malware, internet piracy, child pornography, identity theft, etc with McAffee.
Can you? No? Then shut up, you idea is stupid and so are you.
Autonomous cars are going to be a problem. They might be great... I might own one... I might at some point love them.
BUT they will pose problems that will have to be dealt with and just putting in a safeguard into the OS would HELP but it would not be a panacea.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
(silly in my opinion, apparently they haven't heard of "partners" or considered requiring such cars have a police controlled "slow down" command)
Why is that silly? Do we really think crooks will not find some way of overriding the "slow down" command? As for "partners", a computer does not get stressed or feel under pressure when chased by cops and thus will be less likely to make mistakes.
Why is worrying about this silly?
... despite of me being an engineer, and a computer scientist, I am very much scared of the driverless car.
Oh no, not the scare that you can expect from the layperson; the fear of imperfect driverless cars endangering passers-by or drivers-by. Much worse, the dangers that perfect driverless cars constitute are much worse. And the fear of the FBI - far-fetched or not - is only one of many more to come.
A perfect driverless car will have to be programmed to take a pre-mediated decision in case of some accident, injury or even death becoming unavoidable. If you have plenty of spare time on your mind, start pondering about potential situations occurring outside the control of a driverless car. A driverless car cannot stop within abrupt short time. Just one, one only, example: If presented by either hitting a 4-year-old child or an octogenarian; should it take a random selection, or being programmed? If the latter is the case: who is it programmed to kill? Okay, a second example: You are sitting in a driverless car, with 4 of your family. A bus with 12 passengers comes up frontally (driven by an imperfect human driver, I guess). The whole thing on a narrow bridge, if you hit the bus, probabilities are it will slide to the side and tumble into a canyon. How would you think your perfect driverless car ought to be programmed? For the survival of you and your family, or the survival of the 12 people on the bus? Whichever the decision, the perfect driverless car becomes a pragmatic killing machine.
"then setting the timer to explode before you leave the vehicle next to a school, etc"
Why do you want it to explode before you leave it somewhere? I thought the point was to not die.
I'd be pretty cnocerned about them too.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
They won't even need a button. I highly doubt an automated car will proceed to pilot itself on a high speed chase, or ignore red and blue lights.
Fbi should go back to consulting their Internet slang dictionary, rather than trying to think.
Don't put a kill switch in my car. Kill switches will be hacked and abused. Devices will be sold and marketed to kill a car, even if they are illegal. Just like the MIRT and all the related devices. Illegal as a $7 bill but assholes still buy them.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Italian drivers? You never drove in Italy, don't you?
It makes sense the FBI would be concerned about criminals. Isn't this supposed to be their job? This is just an internal report saying 'here are some things to be concerned about' There are also some positive observations about the cars. There is no hysterical demand that the cars be forbidden, or that the FBI have full override, or anything else. Just some observations about how automated cars might affect law enforcement operations. In other words, nothing at all to see here.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
focuses on one part of TFA and draws sensational conclusions. TFA points out the document is form a group in the FBI whose job it is to look at the impact of technology on crime. TFA points out potential good and bad outcomes. It seems to focus on the idea self driving cars “will have a high impact on transforming what both law enforcement and its adversaries can operationally do with a car.” Looking at the impact of technology is an important part of determining how to deal with it in the context of law enforcement; looking to the future and assessing what it may mean is the job of study groups such as prepared this report.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Knives and other cutting implements can be abused by criminals, don't include them in my kitchen!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
On the one hand, the criminal acts will be more than counterbalanced by the reduction in DUI activity alone. On the other hand, poverty is good for creating crime--some small percentage of people that get laid off turn to crime for income. That would happen within the ranks of laid-off taxi drivers and truckers just as it does everyplace else.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't walk and text.
The Government Control Over All Autonomous Cars Act. It's a working title, we're trying to come up with a backronym for SAFECAR.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Car heaven is where the mechanics are German, the drivers are Italian, and the leather is maintained by a British butler.
In heaven, the lovers are Italian, the cooks are French, the Germans make the cars, the Swiss are the Bankers, and the British are the police.
In hell, the Swiss are the lovers, the Italians make the cars, the French are the bankers, the British are the cooks, and the Germans are the police.
Adults locked in Hot Driverless Cars.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Easy problem to solve.
My car's airbag has an interlock that causes it to shut off when my 6yr old son is in the passangers seat. A similar interlock can be put on the drivers seat. If there's not a living breathing human in the car, it can't "go"
No longer an issue.
Next inane concern the government will try and use to put tracking devices in my car please?
Really? Those are the big concerns? Here are my concerns. They'll run people and animals over and fail to drive properly in heavy snow or rain or GPS will put them through a farmer's field.
Knives and other cutting implements can be abused by criminals, don't include them in my kitchen!
That example isn't even close to being equivalent. We're talking about the possibility that which someone can, with relative ease, wirelessly and anonymously deprive me of the use of my property without leaving much of a trace. You seem to be describing the crime of physical breaking and entering, which I would argue is none of those things.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Why would autonomous cars, ones that are programmed to obey traffic laws, be their first go to?
"I'm going to rob this bank...and then automatically stop at this red light."
No beer and no TV make Homer something something
Putting an automated weapon system in one. Now you can drive by shoot and be miles away.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Kill switch == ambush. Not to mention yet another single point of failure for the already overcomplicated system that used to be just a car.
I would have thought they would be worried about drug smuggling. Being able to pack up a stolen self driving car with drugs would really take the risk out of smuggling. With cars that follow all laws, the odds of it getting intercepted go way down.
We can easily hire the best programmers to create reasonable security. Even then, a properly programed device will not be unhackable. But it will be difficult to hack.
People with the skills to hack such security features will not be common. More importantly, the far majority of them will be in such demand that they won't be hacking cars. If they motivated by money, they will be making it. If they are criminal in nature, they will be hacking other things - such as banks.
I am not saying it won't happen at all. But it will be far easier for a criminal to commit other crimes of mass destruction and the lives saved by ending drunk driving and ending accidents will far exceed the relatively few lives cost by criminals hacking driverless cars.
Any person seeking perfect safety should build a concrete and steel survival shelter and never leave it. But for the rest of us, driverless cars with proper safety and security protocols will reduce crime and death, not increase it
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Safeties can be bypassed. No doubt there will eventually (if these things get off the ground) be some sort of hacker toolkit developed to allow either the owner or the equivalent of "script kiddies" to make the car do whatever they feel like. Just like rooting you phone and installing Cyanogenmod. It'll happen no matter what the FBI says - but hopefully require physical access. If the FBI/NSA try to get their own ... well, let's call it a rootkit, where they could override the software remotely even if it was hacked ... then anyone else will be able to as well. Someone will sell the secret to the Russian mafia or whoever, and all the criminals will have it.
The FBI's concerns may be valid, but are moot - just use a human driver.
Gun battles and bombs? If those are the worries of the FBI, the FBI is making itself look like a bunch of idiots. That's worrying about all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons.
The bombs issue is (sort of) plausible - if we had as bad a problem with bombs as other parts of the world. The gun battles issue is like worrying about your house burning down from lightning strikes because you're using electricity instead of candles. However, given the number of complete idiots who shoot themselves in Big Box stores, etc. we're far more likely to have accidental shootings on highways.
Autonomous cars - ESPECIALLY for-hire (or subscription or shared) autonomous vehicles would create a huge number of changes (good and bad.) I amused myself speculating about this last year without even thinking about the criminal aspect (which a co-worker brought to mind - none of which has been discussed here yet.)
But just think if there was a way to broadcast a signal to cause autonomous vehicles to pull over, slow down, or provide or audio video of the cabin. You know the security of that system is going to be broken in a few months (at most) - but it's going to have to be a pretty standard system in order for it to be used.
Putting an automated weapon system in one. Now you can drive by shoot and be miles away.
This requires two main components:
:)
:)
1) An automatic assault rifle, and
2) A self driving car.
Which one of the two, do you think Americans would prefer to regulate/restrict access to?
Lol, my money is on self-driving car regulation... Long live status quo!
Seriously, though... How crazy do you have to be to be more concerned about self-driving cars being useful for delivering explosives, as opposed to be worried about access to explosives in the first place... America never disappoints to deliver a laugh
Bad guys can program computers to do bad things without any human involvement (beyond the initial orders from the bad guys). Should we give the police kill switches for computers so they can turn off any computer they suspect may be involved in a crime?
Bad guys can also park cars near sensitive locations, pack the trucks with explosives, and detonate them remotely. Should we make all cars with special locks that the police have master keys to? This way the police can open any car at any time if they decide that car might possibly be suspicious.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Easy to follow. Basically you would be leaving a trail of all the crime you committed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nobody is making you have knives in your kitchen. You can have nothing but sporks for all anyone cares.
This would be more like, the police requiring every home to have a glass case with a battering ram next to the front door....just in case they need to use it to get in.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Are you sure that Hell's carmakers and bankers are not mixed up? I don't think driving Ferrari or Lamborghini is a torture comparable to driving Renault or Peugeot. (Oh wait, I get it - there is still Multipla!)
Yes but, also in the real world, devices can be modified from their intended functions. Whether it is implemented via a remote command or simply autonomous identification, is immaterial, because the person in control has physical access to the hardware and can modify it.
Not that I think this is a real threat but, they are right about this as a possibilioty...and I am sure...someday.... it will happen. Luckily, blowing stuff up is already easy. "Terrorists" could have been using RC planes to deliver bombs what.... 40 years ago?
This doesn't really confer any new ability to them, just another way to accomplish the same old thing.
The ONLY real protection we have or ever had was, the vanishngly small number of people with any interest in actually killing others....and its actualy seriously effective.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
That part is correct.
But that pre-supposes that the CRIMINAL has two things:
1. the skills to reprogram the car AND STILL MAKE IT WORK
2. the desire to become a criminal
No. You also need the skills to reprogram the car AND STILL MAKE IT WORK.
Those skills are the limiting factor here.
Only if you had the skills to reprogram the car AND ....
Only if you had the skills to reprogram ....
Only if you had the skills ....
And even then you'd have to have a reason for wanting to become a criminal instead of using those same skills to earn $150,000+ a year programming the cars for Google or their competitors.
The half dead public employees that we call the FBI hope to justify their existence in any way possible. Creating notions of future horrors is part of their attempt to explain themselves. They could not even catch Abe Hoffman when he testified before congress under a false name while on the ten most wanted list. They certainly have done little to stop white collar crime as well. And that mess back in Dallas in 1963 does not reflect nicely on them either.
1) Order six cars to show up outside the bank, direct each to a different location (meanwhile, criminals walk away)
2) Order 2000 more cars to the block where you're robbing the bank, to prevent emergency vehicles from getting there
Design for Use, not Construction!
So, the FBI is doing such a great job, they are now concerned about a technology not yet in use.
making another Weekend at Bernie's sequel? This time, Bernie "drives himself" around!
Not needing a passenger happens to be one of the more awesome features of driverless cars... People can effectively have valet drop off for wherever they go. Cars can be shared because you're staying put at a given location for a period of a time. Cars can drive themselves to maintenance. Cars can make delivery runs.
Quit talking about this stuff in the present tense. It sounds absurd. Driverless cars are not a thing yet. Hopefully one day but today is not that day. Not tomorrow either.
How? It is legally tied to someone. And it has not been reported stolen. Yet it is travelling X miles, unattended.
Unless you're supposing an intra-city delivery service that would probably look very suspicious. How many legal trips match that?
Now, whether the cops could, legally, search it while it is unoccupied on the highway is an issue that will have to be sorted out. But the cops could always contact the registered owner of the car and ASK to search it.
It is not enough to obey the laws. You also have to appear to belong in a category that the cops are not interested in.
Programming. The car is autonomous because of a computer on-board that runs programs.
And those programs are extremely sophisticated. Which is why it is taking so long to get the programming correct.
In order to "steal" a car you have to be able to re-program it. And if you CAN re-program it then why are you willing to give up a job that will pay $150,000+ to program them for Google?
Okay. How do YOU think an autonomous car works?
Auto-navigating fleets could displace street parking and taxis in dense areas, as membership in a five-thousand vehicle self-driving car pool will be less expensive and more convenient. Valet parking everywhere, with a robotic valet. Lower cost of ownership from better use of capital & negligible parking costs.
Anyone doing anything that the police are worrying about it will turn off any overrides the police are demanding. This is about control, pure and simple. Driverless cars are going to thin the ranks of police and trash their budgets so now they are trying to rationalize their existence with ghosts and spectres.
Keep in mind that these are the same people who are buying tanks and have SWAT teams in some of the lowest crime areas of North America. It must be sad to be a cop when they see so many bogeymen hiding behind every tree (so let's cut down all the trees).
Then, and only then, can the FBI credibly worry about this.
"...setting the timer to explode before you leave the vehicle..."
THIS is one of the MANY reasons I do not EVER want there to be 100% autonomous cars on the road. Any such law-enforcement-oriented technology can and WILL be hijacked by criminals to suit their own purposes. If you are in a car by yourself, YOU should be the ultimate intellgence in control of the vehicles' speed and direction, NOT a computer, NOT a cop, and sure as fuck NOT some criminal or some script kiddie who thinks it's funny or something to hack your car.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Embarrassing that our so-called security "professionals" confuse novelty with threat level. After 9/11 they started two wars, greatly amplifying our casualties and economic and political losses. After the shoe bomber they started searching shoes. After the Goodyear blimp crashed into the superbowl they made helium a controlled substance. Now we have to use hydrogen for balloons at birthday parties, which means no more candles on cakes. Why is the response to an attack always worse than the attacks themselves? Maybe that's the point...the enemy counts on our overreaction.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Remote signal is a bad idea.
1) If it's blocked the car won't know (but it will know if a camera is blocked, and should do a fail-safe pullover)
2) twenty year old cars are more common than 20 year old encryption that holds up, which I assume would mean remote pull-over on older cars will be cracked.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Always heard it like this:
Heaven: where the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French, all organized by the Swiss.
Hell: where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organized by the Italians.
My favorite additions:
Heaven is where:
The police are British
The mechanics are German
The cooks are French
The lovers are Italian
The teenagers are Japanese
The movie makers are American
The musicians are Russian
The women are Swedish
And the whole thing is organized by the Swiss;
Hell is where:
The police are German
The mechanics are French
The cooks are British
The lovers are Swiss
The teenagers are American
The movie makers are Japanese
The musicians are Swedish
The women are Russian
And the whole thing is organized by the Italians...
There's also a good one where heaven is "An American Salary, a Chinese Cook, a British House, and a Japanese Wife" whereas hell is "A Chinese Salary, a British Cook, a Japanese House, and an American Wife."
This is where the FBI is heading: expensive licenses with high compliance requirements, including data-sharing on demand with law enforcement agencies.
The licenses will be feasible for larger organizations with no particular fealty to one individual, unless that individual is the controlling shareholder of a closely held corporation. Individual licenses will be as rare as private jets.
There are sound reasons for this approach, and any suggestions how it can be executed without expanding police power or corporate control over daily life will be eagerly registered.
Okay, so you claim to be an engineer AND a computer scientist. That means a LOT of math classes for you.
Yes it can. That's basic math. Stopping distance is determined by 3 things:
1. reaction time (computers are quicker than humans)
2. speed
3. surface conditions
So the autonomous car should stop in a shorter distance than a human would.
Someone with a degree in computer science should know that computers only run programs. Therefore, SOMEONE would have to have made the decision to program the autonomous car to categorize certain objects as "4-year-old child" and other objects as "octogenarian".
Furthermore, someone with a degree in computer science would know how extremely difficult such a task would be.
Whereas recognizing "obstacle" is much easier to program. So the same action would be taken no matter what the obstacle was. And that action should be to stop.
Stop.
If the passenger wants to take over control of the vehicle at that time then that is an option. But the autonomous car should just stop. And it would do that fast than a human could do that.
Again, someone with a degree in computer science can tell you how difficult it would be to write a program that could, correctly, determine how many passengers there were in a vehicle.
So, when presented with an obstacle, the autonomous vehicle should stop. And do so faster than a human could.
Stop.
Now, from a BUSINESS viewpoint the company would be liable for damages should they ship a car that incorrectly identified an obstacle as anything other than an obstacle ("a 4-year-old child", "an octogenarian", "bus with 12 passengers") which resulted in injury or death to the occupants of the autonomous vehicle. Therefore, no company would write such a program.
You have confused "artificial intelligence" with "autonomous car".
An autonomous car is not the same as an artificial intelligence. Nor would an autonomous car be programmed with the sub-routines that you are postulating.
Robot cars will be programmed to obey road laws. Which means they'll pull over for emergency vehicles (to get out of the way), they'll stop for traffic lights, or for pedestrians or any vehicle blocking their path. Any of those is your kill switch. Bad guys with the ability to bypass such programmed behaviour can obviously bypass a kill-switch.
Hell, bypassing the kill-switch will be a common hack in the car-mod community, so the bad guys won't even need to do the hard work.
And if there's a kill signal to stop any car it's pointed at, the triggers must be mass produced for all law enforcement vehicles (and mobile security zones, etc). Which means they will be easily diverted onto the black market and thus available to bad guys to ambush important targets much more easily. That's ignoring hobbyists who break the system and publish the details, and copycat boxes quickly available online. [This means there'll be an exemption to the kill switch requirement for "important" vehicles, which means the kill switch will become a class-based item.]
Thus the only people who could possibly be even inconvenienced by kill switches are everyone except the bad guys.
For that matter, anyone with the ability to wire up a car bomb (especially the ones that use hacked cellphones as triggers) probably has the ability to RC an existing car. So if there was a danger of "guided missile" cars, we'd have already seen it. (Hell, hand grenade on a quad-copter.) It isn't how the bad guys operate. Fill a truck full of ANFO, park it next to the target, run away. Strap a bomb to a gullible teenager, send him into a shopping centre. Who needs a "guided missile" car outside of a lame Hollywood movie?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Investigators already have methods to deal with drug shipments. You follow and wait for a human to intercept the shipment.
You don't want to stop the car, if the dealers have any kind of monitoring system, they'll know they've been rumbled and go to ground. You don't want the dealers to know that anything is wrong until the shipment reaches them.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Anyone capable of wiring up a car-bomb, especially one with a remote detonator (usually a heavily modded cellphone), would probably have the ability to RC an existing non-robot car from off-the-shelf parts. (A quad-copter kit for the electronics and cameras, plus some larger motors and actuators for the car controls.) Even better, unlike bomb making, you can pick the brains of the RC community without fear of being reported. "Hey guys, I thought I'd RC an old van to hack around my farm as a summer project, anyone in the area want to help?"
If there was a demand for this from terrorists (whether domestic or Muslim), it would already be happening.
A robot car would actually make it harder, since it will obey traffic laws, stop when blocked, never exceed the speed limit. That means, for example, you couldn't speed up and jump the curb to get your bomb closer to the building. Or drive through a pedestrian-only path for the last 100 yards. Or smash through a entry barrier. Etc, etc. And hacking it to bypass those controls would likely be harder than RCing a non-robot car, IMO.
An RC car can be driven however you want. A robot car only how Google wants.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
In Rome at least it is crazy -even riding in a taxi around those big uncontrolled roundabouts where everyone just made their own lanes was scary enough.
http://www.h2b.co.nz/blog/wp-content/uploads/IMG_2636.jpg
We rented a car on our last day in Rome to make our way up the coast to Pisa and even getting out to the ring road was an adventure.
Despite being in a fairly small Fiat Punto I managed to get into an alley that required me to ride up on the sidewalk, and once we were headed to the ring road I found myself getting passed from both sides simultaneously by both scooters and cars -and I was not going all that slow!
However, that was not the capper, additionally I:
1)managed to get into the 'old town' section of Sienna -when you are on cobblestones and there are no other cars there you probably don't belong there
2)got a traffic ticket 6 months after the visit for driving through a congestion zone near the Uffizi in Firenze twice (during the offseason they must review videos or something)
On the other hand I'll never forget getting up early one morning and driving through Arezzo over the mountains to Urbino and the Adriatic Sea -absolutely breathtaking!
coming down through the pass the city walls of Urbino looked like something out of Lord of the Rings.
-I'm justsayin'
Don't put a kill switch in my car.
We wouldn't have to put a kill switch in your car if you didn't keep loaning it to terrorists.
Yeah, just like in the movie. Swordfish.
Why "swordfish"? Because the password is always "swordfish".
You are still postulating a hacker that can crack the protections that Google's programmers have put around the code already.
Additionally, now you are also required to:
a. learn which of the hackers in the world is capable of defeating those protections/re-programming the vehicle
b. force/entice that hacker to do so
c. prevent that hacker from selling the exploit to Google before you've completed your crime(s)
And once it is done it will become MORE difficult because Google will issue a patch or recall to prevent it.
The FBI is dumb. Hasn't everyone figured this out yet?
So many people are caught for something when pulled over for a routine car stop for driving too fast or some other minor infraction and then it leads to something more serious... So they want to give up all those arrests because they have a 1 in 100,000,000 chance of something bad happening? Just how often does the FBI engage in car chases with return fire anyway?
One would think the police associations would be against them for the loss of citations and jobs for traffic cops... but why should the FBI care?
My suburban cops have a TANK and we have almost no crime. The FBI could put it to better use.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I was typing too fast. not "give up" but "ignore" -- they go for headline grabbing nothings over the substance.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The one that gets via Internet -of-things the number, age, gender, medical record of the passengers in another car/bus, to minimize casualties. What a brave new world, when we start to steer vehicles in problematic situations into a state of minimal loss to society.
Are you drunk or retarded? No car manufacturer would ever program a vehicle to preference hitting/not-hitting humans based on fucking medical records.
The car will be programmed to try to stop, or swerve into clear space. Failing that, it will be programmed to reduce its speed before impact. That's it. No moral assessments of your life's potential verses another pedestrians. Stop. Avoid. Reduce.
As the programming gets better, it simply means the cars will avoid more and more of the situations you are describing by reacting much earlier. They won't be assessing the relative worth of pedestrians to decide who to crash into, they will be assessing road conditions and probably future risk scenarios to avoid accidents.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
other fictional characters.
Autonomous vehicles, especially ones that can go off-road? Fill the trunk with cocaine, set the GPS for a garage somewhere northeast of Mexicali, and unload it when it arrives.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
More bullshit "security" concerns.
What are the odds that an (easily prevented) driverless bomb car will be any more effective than any other kind of terrorist attack? All we need is a car occupant detector to prevent that. How does that stack up against the lives saved by driverless cars in traffic accidents?
Oh, yeah, and way less traffic ticket revenue for City Hall. It also makes those auto speed detectors in D.C obsolete. Now, if we could only stack them vertical to save parking spaces we would have a nice, disruptive technology.
The promise of having virgin subordinates in the afterlife is not a traditional Islamic belief.
Oh, are you one of those people who reads the Onion and is outraged at how factually incorrect their articles are? I'm sorry... For the record, I don't think there's a JihadBot 3000 prototype either. So don't spread that as truth either...
Well, the biggest criminal in our country was creating a photo-op a few days ago in one, so I guess the title is appropriate. And if he drives like he Leads, he definitely needs a car he does not have to drive. And he will be the first to tell the population that everyone has to buy one for the good of all, or they will face a penalty, oops, no a tax. Wow! It is getting really hard to distinguish between those two isn't it? Our Emperor has already asked for a modification to the programming so that when the driverless car knows that a collision is unavoidable it will choose to collide with the Conservative and miss the Liberal.
If a car doesn't need a driver, then the expensive piece of capital investment that a car represents is simply shuttling passengers around. Such cars will or could be put to work without the owner - it's not just a matter of "send it back home after my commute to pick up the spouse to go shopping", it could also be "pick up x number of people on y number of routes on the way back to my house to maximize use of the vehicle.....err, which is what Google and Uber are presumably heading towards, no? We'll pay you to use your driverless vehicle...how many people would fall for that (and everything it implies).
But at what point do the scales tip and simply doesn't make any economic sense to own a vehicle (except for the pious and pompous Silicon Valley showoffs who want everyone to know about their Tesla)
Best Dilbert Ever. Well, probably.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
is immaterial.
No, it is very important.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are there any other deadly toys you fucking assholes would like to demand that places me in danger?
Are there any other freedoms you'd like to take away from innocent people in the name of safety, authoritarian scumbag? You already have the TSA, the NSA surveillance, free speech zones, protest permits, DUI checkpoints, stop-and-frisk, and a number of other freedom-violating garbage. Is that not enough for you?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just think of the bored teenagers that don't want to go on the family vacation. Yep, they'll rig the car to not go anywhere leaving mom and dad scratching their heads...