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The Coming Terrorist Threat From Autonomous Vehicles
HughPickens.com writes: Alex Rubalcava writes that autonomous vehicles are the greatest force multiplier to emerge in decades for criminals and terrorists and open the door for new types of crime not possible today. According to Rubalcava, the biggest barrier to carrying out terrorist plans until now has been the risk of getting caught or killed by law enforcement so that only depraved hatred, or religious fervor has been able to motivate someone to take on those risks as part of a plan to harm other people. "A future Timothy McVeigh will not need to drive a truck full of fertilizer to the place he intends to detonate it," writes Rubalcava. "A burner email account, a prepaid debit card purchased with cash, and an account, tied to that burner email, with an AV car service will get him a long way to being able to place explosives near crowds, without ever being there himself." A recent example is instructive. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were identified by an examination of footage from numerous private security cameras that were recording the crowd in downtown Boston during the Marathon. Imagine if they could have dispatched their bombs in the trunk of a car that they were never in themselves? Catching them might have been an order of magnitude more difficult than it was.
According to Rubalcava the reaction to the first car bombing using an AV is going to be massive, and it's going to be stupid. There will be calls for the government to issue a stop to all AV operations, much in the same way that the FAA made the unprecedented order to ground 4,000-plus planes across the nation after 9/11. "But unlike 9/11, which involved a decades-old transportation infrastructure, the first AV bombing will use an infrastructure in its infancy, one that will be much easier to shut down" says Rubalcava. "That shutdown could stretch from temporary to quasi-permanent with ease, as security professionals grapple with the technical challenge of distinguishing between safe, legitimate payloads and payloads that are intended to harm." (And don't forget The Dead Pool.)
According to Rubalcava the reaction to the first car bombing using an AV is going to be massive, and it's going to be stupid. There will be calls for the government to issue a stop to all AV operations, much in the same way that the FAA made the unprecedented order to ground 4,000-plus planes across the nation after 9/11. "But unlike 9/11, which involved a decades-old transportation infrastructure, the first AV bombing will use an infrastructure in its infancy, one that will be much easier to shut down" says Rubalcava. "That shutdown could stretch from temporary to quasi-permanent with ease, as security professionals grapple with the technical challenge of distinguishing between safe, legitimate payloads and payloads that are intended to harm." (And don't forget The Dead Pool.)
is going to be massive, and it's going to be stupid. There will be calls for the government to issue a stop to all AV operations, much in the same way that the FAA made the unprecedented order to ground 4,000-plus planes across the nation after 9/11.
That wasn't a stupid decision. It was a reversible order to prevent any immediate further terrorist attack that might be planned until they could get a handle on the situation and figure out who we were at war with and what to do in terms of airline security. While we ultimately made really stupid decisions about airline security, it was the right call. If you remember the mood of the general public on 9/11, we would all have considered it profoundly stupid to let most commercial airlines fly right after that, at least without better precautions than were standard. They had just flown an airplane into the Pentagon and another had crashed on its way toward the Capitol or White House. We had thousands of planes in the air we were trying to keep track of and only a few military jets ready to intercept.
This wouldn't happen if we could track immigrants like FedEx packages!
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
AV car services will not allow the car to transport luggage if there is no person in it. Sure, there are legitimate uses for this case, but they can be handled by a courier service - one that also uses AV technology, but not very much different than the current post services.
The auto industry is utterly clueless compared to most industries about just how important security is when you "computerize" something. It's a toss up as to whether they or the medical device companies will be the first to produce a product with such shoddy security that a script kiddy can actually kill someone with a kit.
And no, that's not sensationalism. You don't see any of them reacting to the news of hacked vehicles at various conferences with a bold corporate initiative to hire a Chief Security Architect to implement a security process for all of their engineering teams to ensure the reduced hackability of their vehicles. You see "meh."
"If the car doesn't have a human shaped heat source in it then pull the car over and have an officer verify occupancy."
The idea behind autonomous vehicles is that after it has delivered us at our destination, it drives itself to an autonomous parking garage or just drives home to get the kids and drive them to school.
They want you to worry about AVs, while they are actually learning to fly DRONES!
Sig ?
The problem is not terrorisst control, it is *State* control.
If cars can be remotely controlled, it is *inevitable* the State will require the ability to do so - to prevent crime, terrorism, for safety purposes, you name it.
All good reasons *but* with the appalling unintended outcome that the State will end up literally able to shut down at will every single car in the country, or have them lock their doors and drive themselves to the nearest police station.
The last ten years have seen the expansion of State power into the complete monitoring of all commuication - in the next decade or so, the State will gain control over personal transportation. States are terrible things. They are so unable to act with and with only their intended consequence that any power they have causes great harm.
The mythbusters were able to make a remote controled car in like an hour with off the shelf parts. If the terrorists really cared they could do the same.
No, it would still happen. Perhaps you'd catch some terrorists faster after they have committed their crimes but you already catch them fast anyway.
Why not social ones? There's two things that create terrorists, mental illness and poor economic conditions. Sane people in wealthy countries don't become terrorist, they've got better things to hope for than Valhalla. Crazy people will exist for about another hundred years or so until we figure out the mechanisms of the brain. Until then we can manage it with treatment.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Far-fetched fantasies like this are just more of the same "throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks" by the taxi medallion owners, who were irritated enough by Uber and Lyft, but are now biting their nails at the thought of Google and other AV operators eating their lunch. The medallion owners know they can't improve taxi service quickly enough to compete, so they are pushing all sorts of nonsense to delay their inevitable demise.
CC companies and their clients aren't that stupid. If you try and sign up for zipcar with a prepaid credit card, it won't work.
Ditto for any recurring billing CC service.
Please help metamoderate.
I'm afraid of autonomous cars carrying drones that drop bombs and fire 3D printed weapons.
I'm also afraid of drones carrying autonomous cars that are equipped with 3D printed weapons.
And 3D printed weapons that fire autonomous cars from drones.
If the car doesn't have a human shaped heat source in it then pull the car over and have an officer verify occupancy.
Blow up doll with a heater
BTW that also works if you want to use the HOV lane
Actually, I think the parent poster is right. AVs can be set up so that the customer can't send the car to a destination. In the early days of AV cars, no package deliveries will be permitted without a person riding in the car who can answer authentication questions en route.
Also, when renting the car, probably you will be required to show a preregistered ID, and perhaps a message will be sent to your cell phone requiring further authentication responses.
No. I think AV cars *can* be made acceptably secure. But it'll be a little tricky and sometimes annoying, requiring some of the conventions we use now when renting a car.
I don't know all the laws and regulations we will create, but I absolutely guarantee you that unlicensed vehicles will NOT be allowed to drive around with no people and load of cargo, unless they picked up that cargo at a licensed and regulated facility (aka UPS, FedEx, Amazon, etc.). There will be sensors in non-licensed vehicles to make sure that if they have any cargo in them, they have to have a person in them at first. Licensed vehicles will most likely be airborne with very light cargo capacity at first (if you don't have a human, it makes more sense to fly).
No, these sensors will not be easy to counter.
And vehicles will also have hard coded restrictions on where they can go and can't go.
The vehicles will NOT even have a receiving antenna, not at first. At first they will require instructions to be made inside the car, with the door closed - and cancel them when the door opens. They will however broadcast their destination to be recorded by the police, but not be able to receive any radio commands.
And most importantly, it is already possible to JUST as much damage, simply by taking a stolen van full of explosives, parking it some place, and leaving it set to detonate in 20 minutes. The author of this paper is clueless about both the current level of risk we have and the level of risk we will accept in the future
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
honestly this is 100% stupid. If you dont think you can do this RIGHT NOW then you are an uneducated moron. Call up towing service and have a vehicle towed to the rear of a building, or a delivery service.
Honestly Slashdot just needs to change it's name to Gizmodo.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
AVs might make it a little easier to do terrorism, but I'm not seeing order-of-magnitude change. Islamist radicals already have AVs in the form of suicide drivers. They go where they want and ram the gates down. McVeigh and Nichols were nowhere near the truck when it went off; the FBI figured everything out from serial numbers on the truck parts in a few hours.
Why do you feel the need to lie about what TFS is saying? TFS says it is a problem that needs addressing, points out what will happen if it is not addressed, but does not itself make claims to how it should be addressed. But with the things you said, you'd think that TFS is advocating for the cessation of all technological developments. So again I ask, why do you feel the need to lie about TFS?
In the early days of AV cars, no package deliveries will be permitted without a person riding in the car
That is knee jerk overkill. There is little evidence that there are massive numbers of domestic terrorists waiting to murder random people at the first opportunity. Anyone could do what the Tsarnaev brothers did, and with a little more brains, they could get away with it. Yet it almost never happens. Autonomous vehicles are not going to change that.
The AV wIll not be usable without a valid, unforgeable drivers license or valid state ID.
Unforgeable ID? My 2003 Oldsmobile has a flawless self driving system installed, I'll sell it to you for a reasonable price too. But it won't go into autonomous mode unless you have an unforgeable ID. Come to think of is, my 1970 Impala had that too.
Requiring an ID is discriminatory.
We already require an ID to operate a vehicle. I have never before heard that described as "discrimination".
Imagine if they could have dispatched their bombs in the trunk of a car that they were never in themselves? Catching them might have been an order of magnitude more difficult than it was.
Or imagine if they could have found a vulnerable person, someone so suggestable as to be bordering on mentally ill, instilled him with their ideology and persuaded him to go out and get himself blown up.
Or imagine if they hadn't actually given two shits about being caught or not.
According to Rubalcava the reaction to the first car bombing using an AV is going to be massive, and it's going to be stupid.
Why are the terrorists waiting for autonomous vehicles? They've got plenty of other options if they want to make a massive kaboom. Find a willing suicide bomber. Hire someone to do it unwittingly. Deliver the bomb by drone. Break into the house of someone who takes the subway every day and line their briefcase with plastic explosives while they sleep.
It's not like we'll all be dead tomorrow if every anti-terrorist agent took the day off.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Hey get real,
yes "they" could,
but "they" would get caught .. afterwards(like any terrorist)
Also because they are leaving a serialnumber nightmare behind themselves,
- turn your notebook on the back, mac + serialnumber
- buy a gsm modem, IMEI .. ok there are some very few gsm/edge-modems where there is software out in the open to spoof the IMEI.
But yes a disposable phone .. paid with a credit card for .. and videotaped your face on the survailiance cam.
Remember, we're just looking our for your safety*.
*and by "your safety" we really mean "our own jobs."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This wouldn't happen if we could track immigrants like FedEx packages!
You mean it would track homegrown terrorists like Timmy McVeigh (Oklahoma city bombing) and homegorwn nut jobs like Holmes (Colorado Theater shooter)?
from the summary
"...the risk of getting caught or killed by law enforcement so that only depraved hatred, or religious fervor has been able to motivate someone to take on those risks as part of a plan to harm other people."
Of course this Rubalcava guy wants to stir up excitement, panic, whatever. That's what people do during the slow times between real disasters. But I doubt that there are no other ways to harm people without risk. I could make a list but for the fact that unimaginative people like Rubalcava would incite more panic with it.
Really, can't you think of ways to harm large numbers of people without risk to yourself?
(Keep them to yourself, no need to advertise them.)
...omphaloskepsis often...
This FUD submittal pales compared to the Corporations Without Rules folks that cheerfully brought us the Great Rescission/Depression of 2008. Voting with your wallet? How's that working for you, especially if a family member or friend is crippled or dead from a faulty product? And a comment that is just as stupid today as it was on the day it was first mouthed, "Corporations are People that speak by using money." Bad guys using Autonomous Vehicles is at best, a mild diversion.
And while this thread is on the topic of bad guys. Why is that ISIL leaders don't hang their LGBT flag in the port of Tartus?
It won't take a lot of people doing it - just one or two - to clobber a nascent technology. Security is going to be a big issue for autonomous vehicles. Not so much concerning 'terrorist' activities, but much more mundane things: theft, delivering drugs or other interesting packages and a host of other felonies and misdemeanors.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't see how this is a worst threat than the current situation provided there plenty suicide bombers available. The driver is only part of the problem to setup a terrorist action against a target. In addition, the AV is much more trackable than any other vehicle and then can be easily and quickly linked to the author. Which defeat partly the purpose of using an AV in first place to not be linked to the terrorist action.
Do you really believe the insurance companies will let these vehicles running without being tracked in order to establish the responsability in case of an accident?
Of course, someone can hijack the AV to make it vanish on the radar, etc. However, this will make each terrorist mission more complicated.
I guess someone in Hollywood wants to build another lame scenario around the usage of AV as remote controlled bombs or whatever.
Achille Talon
Hop!
http://xkcd.com/1559/
I think the TSA is an effective counterargument to your overconfidence that people will accept that risk. Requiring the removal of belts, shoes, watches, and anything steel shows the absurd lengths bureaucrats will go to when overreacting to threats, even very rare ones. I'm sure the giant corporations behind AV cars will be comparably risk averse. After all, should someone actually deliver a bomb in such a car, they could see an immediate end to their entire business, or such a severe curtailment, stockholders could lose faith and sell off.
No, the adoption of AV cars will be gradual and become easier as everyone learns their limits. Initially, the rules for their use will be stricter. As the tech and infrastructure improves, their use will broaden and more variatons will be permitted.
For instance, I'm sure children will not be able to ride unattended until the system gets a few million miles under its belt. The same is likely for unattended package delivery. All it takes is one bomb in one tunnel...
It's going to present some issues no doubt. Things like delivering drugs can be dealt with by ending the stupid prohibition already. In fact, if you're going to be a drug user, it's a lot safer to have them come to you I suppose. Actual hazardous materials, as in stuff that's truly a hazard if it gets loose as opposed to made up authoritarian crap, will have to have special handling and labeling of course, but that's not so dissimilar to how it is now.
Other stuff is a problem. Is it going to be required that an autonomous vehicle tell authorities where it's going? That's not required now for cars and it doesn't have to be required for the operation of autonomous vehicles. (Yes, I know, airplanes don't work like that in controlled airspace, but don't use that as a counter argument. It's a different situation. When using the air traffic control system it's kind of necessary to tell them where you're going to get ATC service on account of them having to check space ahead of you, make sure you're slotted in to certain places, etc.. It's not ever necessary for general aviation operations to tell them who's flying or who's on board. Ponder that one, control freaks, because it works just fine. Some pilots, myself included, don't much care for the Mode-S transponders because they have hardcoded numbers in them that takes away some of that anonymity some of the time at least as far as aircraft identification goes.)
Autonomous vehicles present an opportunity for more freedom but it must be jealously guarded. You can get freedom from tyrannical downtown parking systems that try to ticket you for every little thing and charge outrageous rates just because you want to go to work or go shopping for instance. If you live in the 95% of the US with crap for public transportation, you can get the freedom to go out drinking and not have to worry about getting home, provided that mothers against drinking doesn't try to get laws passed holding you responsible for the operation of something you're not actually operating (which I predict they'll try to do). Depending on the setup you could even have the freedom to not have to own and maintain a car if you don't want to, and freedom from insurance companies is a great opportunity as well. However, there are also tracking and surveillance opportunities at every turn with this stuff, and those will quite literally have to be made illegal and fast before law enforcement tries to make it a fact of life.
That's retarded. I'm sending my Auto to go get the kids and/or the groceries.
Let's just go back to the pre-Industrial age when everybody was "safer". OR - we could stop supporting corrupt, murderous regimes that piss everybody off. The Future or the Past - one will win.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not gonna lie; the first thing that came to mind was the "Beware the Grey Ghost" episode of Batman: The Animated Series. And however many other times RC cars have been used to blow things up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
The thing is (and this is conveniently overlooked by these utterly despicable and repulsive fear-mongers) that there is no effective way to fight terrorism. The only thing possible is after-the-fact identification. Almost all those "terrorists" caught by the FBI are fakes the FBI created itself. Any halfway competent terrorists got to detonate their bombs.
But that means one very important thing (which is really bad for the cause of the fear-mongers and that is one reason they frequently go into hysterics): There are not many halfway competent terrorists. And whether they use cars, planes or backpacks to transport and place their bombs is entirely immaterial, as, due to their small numbers, they do not actually represent an urgent problem. Sure, "law enforcement" loves any and all terrorists, after all they are what keeps them vastly over-funded and "important". That is why the FBI has addressed the terrorist-scarcity problem by growing its own. But the problem itself is so minor as to be irrelevant. And it will not get any larger with autonomous vehicles at all. But again, the fear mongers and terrorist-scare profiteers cannot have that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The "solution" will be "know your customer" laws similar to what American banks have to deal with. Thumb-prints, copies of drivers licenses kept on file, etc. etc.
The follow-up problem will be identity theft won't just be a financial problem any more - I'll steal your identity so I can rent an AV under your name, then go bomb some place, not caring the police will go after you instead of me.
You can also expect that governments will require that companies renting AVs for short-term use will hard-wire them to only be on or near the route that the customer needs them to be on, and that a red flag will be raised if that route comes anywhere close to certain types of buildings, such as government office-buildings.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I don't mean to pee in the swimming pool here, but why again exactly do we need autonomous cars, and what's the rush? Have we run out of humans to drive cars? Are there not enough vehicles on the road? Is there full employment to the point where we need robots to drive commercial vehicles because there aren't enough drivers? And don't tell me, "it will be safer" because as long as there are human-driven vehicles sharing the road, it won't be one bit safer to have autonomous vehicles in the mix.
Every time I see a AV story here on Slashdot, I get the feeling someone is pushing an agenda. I mean, I don't give a shit one way or the other, but it really seems as though this one example of someone thinking about the possible negative ramifications of autonomous vehicles seems to make a certain group of slashdot readers really mad.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And have these vehicles banned from your state
I'm still working on the whole "get military-grade weapons and troop transports banned from podunk towns" petition. I just don't have the energy to get riled by something else just yet.
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
Agreed. The novelty and utility of not having to own a car will more than compensate for the added inconveniences that the fleet owners will require when they first arrive on the market.
Adter all, something like 4 million people now make their living driving cars and trucks and buses. They and their unions will put up a hell of a fight against automation. Fleet owners will have to bend backwards to allay the many threat scenarios proposed. Validation of driver ID and car passenger is a very small bump in the road.
Just about every decent-sized apartment complex or condo is an attractive "soft target," particularly at night when there will be lots of people there. Ditto most decent-sized churches during worship services, most schools during school hours (perhaps excluding those where you can't easily get your car near the classrooms), most movie theaters on a Friday evening, most high-school and middle-school sports venues during games, etc. etc.
Imagine society's outrage if instead of attacking a federal courthouse where he killed over 100 adults and just under 2 dozen little kids, McVeigh had blown up the truck outside of an large elementary school's auditorium during the Christmas play. The overall death toll might have been lower (without the "pancake collapse" of a multi-story building, a lot of injuries would be survivable) but the death toll of children would've been much, much higher, and dozens if not hundreds of victims would have serious, perhaps life-altering, physical and psychological injuries.
Imagine if the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had gone after a high-rise apartment building or hotel in New York instead of a financial center, and they set their bomb to go off at 3AM when the building was full of people, and imagine they used enough explosives to cause at least part of the building to collapse on itself like the Federal Building in Oklahoma City did. The casualties would be huge (not "9/11 huge" but huge) and the fear factor and willingness to give up personal liberties in exchange for supposed safety would be immense.
I hope that the "good guys" in our government - those charged with simultaneously protecting the public from criminals out to do us harm while taking seriously their vow to protect and defending the Constitution [yeah yeah, I know, the cynic in me acknowledges that this group may be the "empty set" - but let's assume for the moment that it's not] - are thinking a lot harder about these issues than I am and are finding ways that can deter such crimes and catch criminals when the deterrence doesn't work without taking America any further down the road to a police state than it already is.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And he's wrong.
No. Because look the times when we have caught the criminal. We cannot stop them from setting off a bomb, but we will catch them after they do so.
So to be a terrorist you have to be willing to die or to spend the rest of your life in prison.
But it will not stop him from being found AFTERWARDS.
Because those actions leave traces. And you will be spending the rest of your life in jail.
No. You're confusing two different scenarios and ASSUMING that the technique that worked in one scenario WOULD BE THE ONLY TECHNIQUE USED in the other scenario.
It COULD. But more likely it won't.
Mostly because he's assuming that an autonomous car will be exactly like a current car + driver ... but with a really stupid robot driver that will do anything you tell it to do. Don't assume that.
Let's face it, an autonomous vehicle would have to be an AI device.Seen any AI devices lately? And,... were you impressed? You don't hear the word 'AI' much these days. After decades of promises and verylittle progress outside some niche areas who dare to come out say he's in the AI field?
I saw a 'robot' this afternoon at a maker faire. Ridiculous. Driving a car through mixed traffic in a dynamic environment with pedestrians, children and old folks, unpredictable or incapacitated. It's impossible to do right with today's state of AI.
And if you *can* get it right then comes the problem of morality. What if the car's computer has to make a moral decision? What will you program it to do?
https://medium.com/@tanayj/sel...
The autonomous car needs Asimov's three laws of robotics, but obviously it's too damn stupid to understand them.
My $50K state of the art plugin hybrid doesn't even understand someone would want to close the windows after shutting off the engine.
Simply put code in the system to allow remote redirection and then in high density areas have a system scan a car using IR. If the car doesn't have a human shaped heat source in it then pull the car over and have an officer verify occupancy.
That just means that each terrorist attack will be preceded by a kidnapping.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
No pun intended but I wish I had
It's an actual product
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Hot water+this. Place in driver's seat
With a handle like "transporter_ii", tracking FedEx packages would be right up your alley !
Yes. Everybody gets hitman-style tattoos.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
And people worry about little plastic quadcopters....
As always, governments act on potential threats to our safety after somehing has happened. It was obvious a train would be targeted, yet an attack on Thalys had to happen before EU governments started thinking about it. Same will happen with AV's. First an attack has to happen, then they will act. Please, governments of the world: here's your chance to, for once, act before another massacre happens.
no, I don't have a sig
Mostly because he's assuming that an autonomous car will be exactly like a current car + driver ... but with a really stupid robot driver that will do anything you tell it to do. Don't assume that.
I won't assume anything, but I question how autonomous cars are going to negotiate with other cars, something I do on a daily basis. And I'm not just talking about the famous one-fingered salute. For example, to get out of my driveway I need to make a right hand turn on to a busy street that often has a long line of cars stopped at a light. I've found through trial and error that the quickest way to get moving is to roll my window down, stick my arm out the window, give the next car in line a jaunty wave, a toothsome grin, then I clearly mouth the words "Thank You!". Even if they previously had no intention of letting me in, since I've preemptively thanked them, 98% of the time they'll let me go (the other 2% are clearly sociopaths.)
Now with autonomous cars on the road how are such interactions going to be handled?
In the early days of AV cars, no package deliveries will be permitted without a person riding in the car
That is knee jerk overkill. There is little evidence that there are massive numbers of domestic terrorists waiting to murder random people at the first opportunity. Anyone could do what the Tsarnaev brothers did, and with a little more brains, they could get away with it. Yet it almost never happens. Autonomous vehicles are not going to change that.
In some cultures it would take massive numbers to achieve this effect.
In cultures like the USA or UK it wouldn't even take one. All it would take is an unsubstantiated rumor that one was being planned. Thats how fearful these cultures are.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I think the TSA is an effective counterargument to your overconfidence that people will accept that risk. Requiring the removal of belts, shoes, watches, and anything steel shows the absurd lengths bureaucrats will go to when overreacting to threats, even very rare ones. I'm sure the giant corporations behind AV cars will be comparably risk averse. After all, should someone actually deliver a bomb in such a car, they could see an immediate end to their entire business, or such a severe curtailment, stockholders could lose faith and sell off.
No, the adoption of AV cars will be gradual and become easier as everyone learns their limits. Initially, the rules for their use will be stricter. As the tech and infrastructure improves, their use will broaden and more variatons will be permitted.
For instance, I'm sure children will not be able to ride unattended until the system gets a few million miles under its belt. The same is likely for unattended package delivery. All it takes is one bomb in one tunnel...
I'm sure that the USA has been very close to handing out overalls to people boarding planes and requiring everyone to remove all personal belongings for check-in and wear the provided overalls to get on the plane.
After all clothing could be disguised explosives!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Forget the stupid AVs. They need streets, follow traffic rules, can relatively easy be searched, might even get stuck in a traffic jam at prime time.
A drone with GPS guidance and environment awareness can fly sufficiently close to buildings, too close for flight radar, does not need any street, cannot be searched, only taken down. If equipped with poison or explosives, the drone might not hit the target, and yet will be anything but pleasant.
The only downside is the payload. You can't load her up to kilotons TNT, though, on the other hand, the potential precision is much better, and the payload can be deposited - in average - much closer to the target.
I'm sending my Auto to go get the kids and/or the groceries.
Can't you just train a horse?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
has the scene where he uses what's meant to be off-the-shelf tech to allow him to remotely pilot the panel van into the police station before detonating it. If you can 'see' where you're going and you have basic L/R controls you don't need autopilots or AIs.
Technology is very bad. Fool. Technology is gonna git ya. Fool. I'm telling you, we don't know what technology will do next .. therefore let's try to stop it. Let's stop evolving. Are you a fool who panics when something goes wrong because you don't understand a system and think all problems are unsolvable because you yourself can't think of how to solve them? Well then technology isn't for you. Technology is bad. You don't know nothing about technology, so it means technology will always be bad. Because if a fool like you can't solve it, it must mean non-fools can't come up with a solution either.
I am enamored of your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Trying to follow these simple "but! terrorists can use it!" angles is like watching that Thug Life video, Cat Loves To Knock Things Over!. You know it's a cat video, you've read the title, you know what the cat is about to knock things over, and look, it's happening. Wow. It happened. Cats are cute and we'll watch them do anything. But terrorists aren't cute, so being told to imagine them doing some no-duh obvious thing that could never be avoided with any great assurance without compromising our human desire to innovate, is kind of boring.
When I'm bored, I re-post.
___
(Meanwhile, in some sorry-ass future)
I know autonomous cars will be "oh so safe". At the moment I'm just as worried about what these things will make people do to people.
[OPENING OVERTURE]
Your driver liability insurance policy has come up for review. We have been recently been acquired by AAAA, the quadruple-A company -- the "Autonomous AAA of the future" and what that means for you as a member is -- it has never been easier to upgrade to an a-car! Financing is available! [link] Due to increasing pressure in the political, legal and underwriters' arenas, we regret to inform you that the cost of your driver policy will be rising this quarter in order to begin collection of fees for the Federal National Driver Insurance Pool, and rising at a steady rate thereafter. It will continue to rise over time despite your [good to excellent] driving record. Now that the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act is law, and blanket liability accident investigation procedures have been approved by Congress, the legal liability of autonomous vehicles is capped nationwide. While this grants the manufactures freedom from risk of direct criminal penalty and potentially unlimited civil liability, it places human drivers in a difficult position. Most a-car accidents will, of historical necessity rather than actual circumstances, be "no-fault". Since human drivers and any victims claiming injury from them are still obliged to use traditional law enforcement and legal means of redress -- and the cost of these continues to rise -- underwriters are pressuring insurance companies to drop human drivers altogether. We do not intend to do this, but we can no longer provide policies for extended periods. Your new maximum policy period is now [one month]. Thank you for insuring with AAAA.
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Meanwhile...
Dear editor: DRIVERS cause accidents. A-CARS prevent them. That's what the billboard says -- and if Howard County Referendum passes this September manually operated cars will soon be a thing of the past here. What started as a discussion at a hearing after last year's tragic accident grew into a full heated debate, and to think it all started with the parents who provide their children with a-cars pinning the blame squarely on other peoples' children. But then, after co-opting the national campaign with its slick literature and canned answers for everything -- NOW
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I personally LIKE driving my vehicles....the autonomy and freedom it gives me....and well, I've never in my (getting longer) life owned a car with more than two functional seats, always sports/performance cars.
Every day when I sit in it, fire up the engine and crank up the stereo...even a trip down the street to the grocery store is an adventure and a pleasure.
I feel sorry for folks who think a car is nothing but a means to get from point A to point B.
Life is short...it should be enjoyed.
And personally, I like it when I'm getting from point A to point B in a fast manner (of course, given that driving conditions at that time/place are safe enough to do so).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Thus from an old market a new market emerges.
Of course, the guard will be a robot too.
The easiest and only solution to this is to standardize the Autonomous Vehicles. A central system which keeps track on all the vehicles, owners and agencies/companies using them. Yea there are chances of hacks but then every machine is hackable, isn't it?
White people are not terrorists, you silly.
Be afraid - you're easier to control when you're scared.
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
Continuing to project the notion in the world that you (being any group at all) deserve and are worth attacking. Blowing things up is a pretty useless act, there are not many reasons people do it, and if you could limit the sense of doing it by say....not attracting it, its generally pretty rarely an issue.
Course, when you go around dropping bombs on human beings and sending arms to opressive regiemes that do deserve it....well....guess what happens?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
With police loving their Chrysler products - you can pretty much shut them down over a cell connection.
Roughly the same as electrons on a bus, with each electron having it's own collision avoidance routine programmed. If every vehicle is autonomous, there wouldn't even need to be a light at intersections. It would flow analogous to the sync gear on the old war planes that kept the machine gun bullets timed where they would not collide with the propeller. Traffic could actually run very fast in very close proximity with dynamic flow adjustment allowing side traffic to seamlessly flow into the trunk. Kinda like this.
" Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were identified by an examination of footage from numerous private security cameras that were recording the crowd in downtown Boston during the Marathon. Imagine if they could have dispatched their bombs in the trunk of a car that they were never in themselves? Catching them might have been an order of magnitude more difficult than it was."
Let's see. Car...registration, license plates...probably fingerprints, and random DNA from hair. Yeah, that will be a "magnitude more difficult", even if it's a rental.
Just another day in Paradise
Look, living in denial might be fashionable, but I'm a former combat field engineer with automation experience and it's a true statement that self-guided automobiles are far more dangerous than even self-guided drones with weapons payloads.
The door panels alone, if used for shaped charges with anti-personnel additions, could easily be used to wreak havoc almost anywhere, if the vehicle has self-sealing puncture-proof tires, you couldn't even take it out with normal security weapons, and the GPS and internal guidance could deliver it to the target area with a 98 percent chance survival rate to impact.
Talk all you want about how you think you can stop things, and realize that some people spend years training to do those "impossible" things.
We now return you to your concept that you're safe. There is no such thing as safe, btw.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've often wondered if the people who find every 3 minute car ride an "adventure" are trying to justify to themselves the amount of money they spend on vehicles.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying driving. I'm a motorcyclist, I love the feeling it provides. But not every trip to the store is white knuckle adventure.
isn't really something to form a policy basis on, or even a +5 on /. . And we've got plenty of Christian fruit cakes here, they just mostly keep to beating up the black folk down south. Remember the KKK? Home grown terrorism at it's best.
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I've often wondered if the people who find every 3 minute car ride an "adventure" are trying to justify to themselves the amount of money they spend on vehicles.
I always assume that they've been brainwashed by car ads, and really do think that, instead of popping out to Walmart, they're really on the way to a futuristic nightclub with their supermodel girlfriend.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Also, it's funny that you feel sorry for people who consider transportation to be functional rather than exciting?
Maybe it's a sad commentary on YOU that the most exciting thing in your life is a car. Try getting out more. Travel. Experience new things. I feel sorry for YOU if your entire life's pleasure comes from the rather mundane task of getting to the grocery store.