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When Should Cops Be Allowed To Take Control of Self-Driving Cars?
HughPickens.com writes: A police officer is directing traffic in the intersection when he sees a self-driving car barreling toward him and the occupant looking down at his smartphone. The officer gestures for the car to stop, and the self-driving vehicle rolls to a halt behind the crosswalk. This seems like a pretty plausible interaction. Human drivers are required to pull over when a police officer gestures for them to do so. It's reasonable to expect that self-driving cars would do the same. But Will Oremus writes that while it's clear that police officers should have some power over the movements of self-driving cars, what's less clear is where to draw the line. Should an officer be able to do the same if he suspects the passenger of a crime? And what if the passenger doesn't want the car to stop—can she override the command, or does the police officer have ultimate control?
According to a RAND Corp. report on the future of technology and law enforcement "the dark side to all of the emerging access and interconnectivity (PDF) is the risk to the public's civil rights, privacy rights, and security." It added, "One can readily imagine abuses that might occur if, for example, capabilities to control automated vehicles and the disclosure of detailed personal information about their occupants were not tightly controlled and secured."
According to a RAND Corp. report on the future of technology and law enforcement "the dark side to all of the emerging access and interconnectivity (PDF) is the risk to the public's civil rights, privacy rights, and security." It added, "One can readily imagine abuses that might occur if, for example, capabilities to control automated vehicles and the disclosure of detailed personal information about their occupants were not tightly controlled and secured."
After watching this video Im pretty sure the cars can detect gestures to pull over.
As the car is doing the driving it should follow the demands of a police officer (as opposed to the passenger) although Im sure it will be hacked around at some point.
https://www.ted.com/talks/chri...
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If the police can take control of an automated vehicle, then so can the bad guys. There is nothing magical about the police. They have power because they have guns and lots of buddies to back them up. They have authority to use this power because other humans have agreed to give it to them. Technology cannot tell the difference between the police and some random jackass and so unless we want to live in a world where anyone can commandeer a self driving vehicle, we should not allow anyone to be able to do it.
An automated car could be programmed to be pre-empted by emergency vehicles using lights in the standard manner, but how, exactly, would police stops be handled, especially when the stop is a gesture from the side of the road? There is going to have to be a device which police carry that broadcasts a standardized signal to pull over and stop. It will have to be secure against being imitated by criminals, perhaps with frequently-changed security keys.
Just deploying these to all the agencies that will need them is a non-insignificant problem. And cities are going to require that the devices, deployment and maintenance be paid for by the manufacturers.
and you're the subject who'll suffer
Never mind the possible abuses from police, if the cops can take control, you've left a security hole that can be exploited. While cars may drive themselves, it's still necessary to have a human who can take control if needed. If the police need to pull a car over, the person in the car should take control, manually drive, and pull over. Let's not make cars with huge security holes like that. Current cars have enough security holes already.
The car will refuse to run over anyone, policeman or otherwise.
Then once the policeman has the occupants full attention, he can then instruct him to pull over.
The big red button. If you press it, the car will continue to your destination unless physically disabled or completely blocked, regardless of non-traffic signals. It needs to be there for times when it is unsafe, or the occupant feels unsafe, with questionable external conditions (fake emergency vehicle signals, etc). And cops should be just fine with that because self-driving cars will otherwise obey the rules of the road (i.e. not speeding or running traffic signals), so if they really need to stop the car they can (a) surround it and slow down/stop to prevent the car from moving or (b) follow it to its destination - which in an emergency should be selectable by the operator as the original destination, the closest police precinct, or closest hospital emergency room entrance. There is no need or reason to offer electronic remote kill capabilities.
By choosing a fully automatic car, you give up a level of independence in return for convenience. I, for example, don't carry a sidearm or wear protective body armor today. That puts me in an inferior position to those who do, or those who have greater physical strength. It doesn't bother me because I evaluate the chance of needing such things is smaller than, say, being struck by lightning. I trade the convenience of lower kitted weight and bulk for an inferior defensive position.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's not really that hard for a bad guy to buy a cop costume. Humans can't tell them difference between the police and some random jackass. Also, if a guy is standing in the middle of the road signaling you to stop, you're gonna stop just to not run him over.
I think self-driving cars should be treated as taxis. Just like you can't expect your taxi driver to disobey a cop, nor can you expect your SDC to.
If they all stop for a pedestrian in the way, then it will be trivial for criminals to stop any car they want for any reason. Just stand in front of it.
The hierarchy of control should go this way:
1. Owner (should have an override that can shut off the engine even if not driving)
2. Driver (If they're behind the wheel only an owner can shut them off)
3. Police (can shut off any car not being piloted or directly controlled)
4. The AI
Here is how police should work... THE SAME WAY they do with normal drivers. A police car does not shoot your engine out or something. What they do is flash their lights and tell you pull over. And you DECIDE to pull over because you don't want to be in violation of more laws.
And that is how the AI should operate. If the AI is just zipping down the road and an AI police officer pulls you over (does anyone see that coming?). The AI in your car should DECIDE to pull over. It isn't being forced to do it. I can say "HA HA YOU"LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE COPPER!"... but it should only do that if you told it to do that. Otherwise it should pull over like a law abiding AI.
We've all discussed to death the issue with police overrides and how hackers can use them take control of your car.
So here is the solution. Rather than just have the AI comply immediately, you can have the AI PING the cockpit or cabin and say "Police request pull over". Then you have ten seconds in the car to reject that. If you don't reject it... then the car pulls off to the side of the road. Where likely as not a friendly Securitron will roll up wearing mirrored sunglasses and tell you to respect its authoritah!
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
never. next question?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Who owns your car? Who does it serve? Who does it obey?
We lost the war for our pocket and portable computers (cell phones and tablet). We lost the war for our TVs, movie players, DVRs, etc. We lost the war for the computers that are already in our cars.
Most disturbing, we are in the process of losing the war for our desktop computers, the very heart of general purpose computing as an individual right.
If we want to own our cars, we need to stop losing control of our computers, pronto.
See that "Preview" button?
Even TFS's idea does nor require a need for a cop to take control of the car. All it needs is for the car to recognize a human (any human) standing in the road signalling traffic.
Current cars probably would have to be manually prompted to pass the cop as they all seem to automatically give way to pedestrians.
If an officer gestures for you to stop, you must stop. Period. This is no different for an autonomous driver than it is for a human driver.
it's clear that police officers should have some power over the movements of self-driving cars
No, this is not clear at all. If police (or anybody that I haven't authorized) can take control of my vehicle, then I don't want that vehicle.
But they should under no circumstance be able to redirect it to a new location without physically entering the vehicle. That is not reasonable behavior, an un-neccessary security risk that can be abused by non-police.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Any time the cops stop an autonomous car they have to pay the owner of that car $1000, no matter what the reason for the stop. Compared to the legal costs of what comes after a legitimate stop, that's nothing. But it would dissuade police from developing a pattern of frivolous stops.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You know how this is going to turn out, you just know it. Bow to your OWNERS!
When you give up control, you have no control. The car will do whatever its manufacturer and the powers that be want it to do. I have no interest in a self-driving car. I prefer to remain a self-driven human being.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
And what if the passenger doesn't want the car to stop—can she override the command, or does the police officer have ultimate control?
No... the driver already surrendered ultimate control to the car by choosing a self-driving vehicle, and I expect the vehicle to obey the law, Even over the driver's wishes, which says that citizens must follow a lawful official's orders, unless following the order clearly violates civil rights or creates an immediate safety hazard for themselves or another person.
Being required to stop your vehicle and pull over to be detained is a legal reasonable order, So long as the car can legitimate establish the authority of the person directing.
Your self-driving car should take some precautions, in case the person gesturing your car to stop is a crook in disguise.
I see a possibility of allowing the driver to override a gesture, if the driver has the autonomous vehicle place a 911 call and hold the horn down. The driver's picture identity and vehicle info will be automatically transmitted.
Until cops take responsibility for their mistakes and misdeeds, they should be given less power, not more.
I foresee many police-driven autocar crashes where the cops say simply, "Oh well", and walk away from responsibility.
When they personally own them, and only then ever.
I don't see what is so hard about that.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Cops stops car in the road. Bus behind it (manually operated, because unions) keeps going, rear ends car. Car bursts into flames, killing occupants. Who pays?
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe like if they are really hungry for donuts, they should be able to make a self-driving car be able to get them some.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
NEVER
So if I see cops in an unlawful traffic maneuver— like rolling through a red light without their lights and/or sirens on— should I be able to pull them over?
It's called a ``citizen's arrest'' in most states in the U.S. and various other former British colonies (like the Republic of Ireland, the Kingdom of Scotland, et al. ;-).
Should there be some automated device or mechanism that forces their vehicle to comply with my demands? Turn about is fair play, after all: if I surrender my civil rights to them shouldn't they be required to surrender theirs to me in turn?
What if there's a high speed chase and I am a civilian crossing guard at a senior citizen home and I think the coppers are endangering my homies?
Just askin' (*wink*). (And, yes, this is intended to be a bit tongue in cheek.)
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
People already spoof their number to send a SWAT unit to an otherwise quiet house in the middle of the night. There is absolutely zero reason to believe that giving police override control of a car won't result in the same kind of abuse.
It has always been my assumption that about half the time autonomous cars are moving about they will not have any occupants. Cars will be more like taxis that are summoned, take one or more passengers to someplace, and are then dismissed so they can go pick up the next rider(s). Oh yeah, rich folk will have cars that are driven by chauffeurs but the rest of us will not own automobiles any more than we own airplanes. So I expect a centralized car-management system will be aware of where each car is, where the police are, what roads are temporarily closed (why would an autonomous car ever take a rider through a section of road that was temporarily closed?), and so forth. Yep, it will be quite complicated. And you will hardly notice because you will have your nose in your work or book or news article or game or video show or whatever. Your car will stop and it will go - you will pay no attention because there's no need/point in paying attention. And if the cops want YOU, then your car will deliver you to them.
The scene from "I, Robot" comes to mind. After the machines take over every car grinds to a halt except for the protagonists (Will Smith) motorcycle which hasn't been instilled with government controls. Seriously we're setting ourselves up for major problems in the future with centralized controls of any type. Only a idiot puts a nuclear plants control systems on the internet, and only the heir to the kingdom of idiots puts remote kill switches in the nations transportation network. One hacker could cause millions or even billions of dollars in damage. Even if limited to input via local/video sensors you're still creating some significant safety issues, how long before car jackers throw a police uniform in their bag and start waving down random cars on desolate stretches of road.
Ok, so none of us likes the idea of the cops being able to take full control of the car. It leaves a security hole ripe for abuse and mischief, and the cop is not necessarily in the position to determine how best the car should move.
However, under the assumption that a self-driving car will have a manual mode, what if the cop could emit a signal that disabled the autopilot? That would put the driver in control again, who could then decide whether or not to follow the cop's instructions as well as determine how to do so in the safest manner. Make it a broadcast signal that blankets a certain area, so that the driver gets plenty of warning that they'll have to take over before arriving at the controlled intersection.
That should work long enough for us to figure out how to have an AI recognize a traffic cop's instructions.
They have power because they have guns and lots of buddies to back them up.
It's very much the latter, and not the former. It's the 'lots of buddies', i.e. the power of the police force, the courts, and the prison system, that give rise to their meaningful 'official powers'. Take away the gun, and nothing really changes. Source: am British.
Technology cannot tell the difference between the police and some random jackass
There's no inherent reason why a machine must be less capable at this than a human.
While the police would need the ability to order cars to pull over (bank robbery getaway, or a kidnapping, etc.), there's also the problems of police abusing their authority and people impersonating officers to deal with. Rather than allow police more control than "pull over at the first safe opportunity" and "this area is unsafe, detour this way", we should also be implementing verification that the orders are lawful. A transponder in the officer's badge that could be detected by the car is one idea - where the car can communicate with the local police headquarters to verify that said officer is on duty, is an officer in that area and is not a duplicate, and what their status is if their own car/equipment can't communicate with HQ. Of course, there should be a manual override available in the event of communications jamming or the scene becoming unsafe for some other reason.
Such devices are, for the most part, non-directional and indiscriminate. Destroying all electronic devices in a 2-4 block (or greater) radius would not be well received. And what you do see about them on TV is only superficially correct at best.
I've been pointing out the obvious ever since they had the brilliant idea of controlling a car by Turing machines on an internal network, hooked up to a external cell phone network. It will follow inevitably that: bad guys will take control, at the worst possible time, or police will exercise their immediately taken prerogative to stop, control, or block vehicles, or a combination of the two, as police aren't always nice, and sometimes the term "police" means "shadowy people who have lots of power and don't like you - at all."
It will be used immediately to monitor and control cars run by poor people in rich neighborhoods or towns, because of the Children, of course. And the Wikileaks supporters, and people like Assange or Snowden, or women rights supporters in Saudi Arabia wouldn't dare step into a swell new car without taking a chance that the car doors lock, the windows freeze, and their cars drive to a lovely lonely place with a waiting squad of armored men with machine guns await them for a final escort to a place where people never leave, alive or dead. Not only do your phones and TVs listen in and track you, but you can't trust your car not to take you away while you try desperately to break the windows. They'll probably just provide a escort car behind to make sure you can't jump to freedom.
Picture this, if the above scenario makes you giggle: you're driving to work, and suddenly your steering wheel stops working. The car exists the freeway, and drives to a police station, where a squad of SWAT-armored (they wear it to bust massage parlors, for satan's sake) point guns at you and tell you to exit the vehicle. Why? Who the fuck cares? You could have too many parking tickets (and they will KNOW when you park illegally). Hell, they'll just build a concrete box to slot cars into, to make it dead easy to get you out without risk to themselves. Mass removal of troublemakers made automated. Hell, just drive the cars into a jail receiving garage and starve the passengers out if they don't want to get out, why risk a cop?
I wonder how they'll support local law enforcement when cars *can't* speed? I digress. They'll invent new crimes, of course.
It will be damned impossible to annoy or challenge people with power to control your car. It'll be a rolling arrest cage. God, what good little boys and girls we shall be.
A fun note, to the person who called me out as insane when I predicted a terrorist would just nuke the car controls en masse with an EMP bomb/gun, when I used the term "carnage": when they killed the WIRED journalist's car dead on the expressway, he had a truck barreling up behind the car. If the truck had hit him, "carnage" would have been the term to describe his death. And that was a FRIENDLY demonstration of what happens when you let a computer control your brakes, controls, and accelerator.
What am I saying? Don't. Let. Computers. Control. Your. Car. EVER. Don't buy them, demand mechanical controls. Buy an Elio, when and if they come out, and make sure the Elioites don't "improve" the autocar by adding self-driving computer systems. Not that they'll have a choice, if we don't start fighting this off now.
I have no hope this stops. A generation of people who went to school with their faces on their floor while dogs sniff their crotches, and were arrested if they drew someone punching someone, aren't exactly trained to fight for their freedom. They never had freedom; how would they care?
The feature could be available, but the user should be able to remove it should they choose to. Now if your car has the auto-stop feature, that might make things easier with the officer, then again a crook could simply turn it on just before they approach a cop, sort of like buckling up when you see a cop. In no way should it however become a required feature, we might "live in the future" but we still have slavery in today's day and age, lets not forget we evolve very slowly.
Yup. Since the drug war and 9/11, the young have been raised in a police state. They know nothing else. And don't get me started on the technoeutopians... rich white kids who will never have their cars driven to a lonely spot by a cop for a little impromptu electrocution and tooth extraction. It's the troublemakers and the poor who will see the interior of a Vehicle Sequester concrete box when they annoy some Homeland Security hawk or local cop or even one of our lovely CIA bastards assigned to remove Snowdens from the world.
We're living in a giant, open air prison. I hate being right.
"How about the day after they get to assassinate people for any reason or no reason?"
And why was this downscored? How about that day?
"I don't think there will be much argument about this, particularly in Amercia, where the deaths per capita inlicted by 'law enforcement', are similar to the murder rates in more civilised countries."
Well said. And rightwingers only have so many mod points, so let me give ya a hand here.
Q.) When should cops be allowed to take control of self-driving cars?
A.) When cops suspect the car contains cash!
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Groups will come out proclaiming how many lives will be saved by allowing Law Enforcement, DHS, CIA, FBI, School Crossing Guard to have the ability to disable/control Self-Driving cars, it will probably be "children" that will be saved
Any opposition that proclaims Rights, Liberty, or even cold hard facts that will dispute these Groups, will be shouted down as cold-hearted, unconcerned for safety etc.
Awesome!
Why don't we just replace the cops with robots too. Maybe a series of lights that a camera can do hue detection on. Jokes aside, traffic cops really are kinda pointless when they could program a portable traffic lamp that could be rolled out to do the same custom flow required for the hour or whatever. We have them (cops) in Dallas directing traffic out of Big Business and Big Religion parking lots. I like to watch them. They rarely care about conditions, instead just relating an alternate yet regular traffic pattern.
So just a silly little question came to my mind thinking about why would the police tell your car to pull over. If the police officer wants to give you a fine for some driving related issue, whose fault is it? Who gets the ticket? For example, maybe your self-driving car was just speeding (cause it missed the speed sign or whatever). Do you get the ticket or does your car get the ticket? If the car gets the ticket, does it then have to provide an Uber service for the night while you are sleeping to pay for it? Who compensates you for the wear due to this etc.. ANd so on.. :D
If a person is not wearing a bodycam that is on, and recording footage, they must not be a real cop. Hmmm?
This bothers me in a bunch of ways.
First, is implementation.
I can think of two ways of doing this. First is local radio, or light based communications. All automated cars broadcast, and then a reciever determines who's where, so the officer can direct a specific machine to stop. Then that box has to transmit the right code to casue a car to stop. I can not see how that protocol will not be hacked and abused in weeks, if not hours of implementation. That's it's own little version of hades. If "anyone" can stop your car, you won't let ANYONE stop your car.
The second method, is with a database. Each automated car, sends it's location to a central database at all times. When a police officer wants to pull you over, he can scan the database and find your car, and tell it to do something. This method seems like it would be reliable. But then we have the database problem.
That database could be stolen. Now someone can track you, and knowing databases, now knows where your car has been for X number of days, weeks, or months.
Second, the police now know where you are at all times. Well, that's someone, but it's supposed to be someone safe. Third, now there's a database to sell, and a command that can be issued that stops your car. The slope gets VERY steep here... so lets tread carefully.
Lets say you have 50 parking tickets. The private agency in Chicago that covers parking tickets wants to boot your car. They pay the Chicago PD to have access to that database, and issue the signal to boot your car. ... anywhere. Lets say you're in ohio when they do their processing run, well you could be stuck there.
The same goes for registration. Lets say the state sees your registration expire, they'll tell your car that it can't drive legally. So it wont' drive. Sounds fine, until you look at the realities of where you can drive an unregistered car. Or transport it. GPS isn't accurate enough, property lines aren't drwan well enough, and many other factors would lead to disabled cars in legal places.
Finally, what if your car gets registered wrong? Someone else's car is the target of disablement, and instead your car gets disabled.
Sure, all of these things could probally be addressed with lots of time and paperwork, but nobody is going to pay me back or my time spent fixing their errors.
You would have to be crazy to be sane in this world. -Nero
SDCs should cut way back on useless policemen because most police spend 99.9% of their time either doing nothing or harassing drivers for money. Very few police spend very little of their times preventing or investigating crimes. With the revenue stream of bullshit tickets gone the police budgets for bullshit police should also dry up.
Thus the remaining police should be, in theory, actually busy doing actual policework. Thus like many worries about self driving cars, their ability or inability to stop them shouldn't really end up being much of an issue with just a tiny few strange edge cases.
Where it will get interesting is if you watch a typical episode of cops the police often have the same MO. A board cop looking to show off for the cameras will go to a poor neighbourhood. He will wait for a car with 4 or more black men in it drive by. Then he will follow behind for the 30-60 seconds it takes them to break one of a massive set of traffic violations, and then the cop will pull them over with his ready made excuse in hand. But then the police will "search them for weapons" demand ID and eventually search the car. Then somewhere somehow a felony or warrant will be discovered and the policeman can make some excuse that he took some more "dirtbags" off the streets. Except that warrant was probably for not paying fantastically expensive bullshit traffic tickets issued during previous similar stops. And if the driver doesn't have a licence it will be because the guy lost it for not paying said fines.
So am I concerned if those police all lose their jobs, NO; am I concerned that they might have trouble pulling people over, NO. The threshold for pulling a SDC over should be that they are certain that the specific car contains an active and ongoing serious crime such as a kidnapping. But if they start doing things like redirecting all the SDCs to a checkpoint so they can do warrant checks or with some BS excuse that there was a recent robbery then screw them and their fourth amendment violating inbred deliverance level thinking.
never. next question?
It's always nice to see someone think things through carefully and provided a well argued, grammatically correct post on slashdot.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Self driving cars cannot disobey traffic laws or "drive erratically"... so, the answer is we don't have traffic cops. Period. When the 70 million driving jobs evaporate from self-driving car adoption, so should the jackboot jobs as well.
How's "never" work for you?
Too long? How about "Until the police have shown themselves to be responsible"?
Still sounds a lot like "never" to me.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.