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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Automated jaywalking tickets, here we come.

Or better stopping vehicle-ramming terrorist attacks like the one in Stockholm last week. Just imagine a system setup on the vehicle where it detects above-average acceleration in a downtown area (GPS supplied) in addition to abnormal swerving coupled with pedestrian data from the sensor network, the auto-pilot system kicks in and takes over the vehicle bringing it into grinding halt immediately.

or we could just take the steering wheels away.

I feel like that would be easily circumventable given time and resources.

I imagine most attacks aren't people being like "You know what, I'm sick of life. I'm just going to ram my truck into people"

Right, it's an arms race between us and the terrorists but at this point in time we need to make this weapon turn from low-tech to high-tech to operate thus raising the barrier and make it prohibitively difficult for losers to hijack or drive trucks to kill pedestrians on the street.

It's not an arms race. No amount of user-unfriendliness will ever make it "that" difficult to purposefully use a vehicle maliciously. Terrorist organizations are well funded. As long as vehicles powered by engines or even motors, everything else in the vehicle is gravy. Rip out all the electronics, put in new ones that just fire the cylinders or run the engine. It's not a solvable problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnOPD2MOngU Here is a small engine whose timing is controlled by an Arduino. You vastly overestimate what can be done, and underestimate the intelligence and willpower of terrorists.

All you're achieving is making it harder for everyday people to work on their vehicles.

> but at this point in time we need to

If you want to make every aspect of life feel like commercial air travel does at present, then sure, then play your ever-escalating game of whack-a-mole, but please don't speak as if the conclusion is so foregone. And don't pretend the benefits will naturally materialize (when history has shown that they won't). The cost of such a system is the only part of it that's guaranteed.

"The trouble with you Americans is you think every problem has a solution," it has been observed.

One could also think of the opposite - human-targeting AI vehicles.

I'm sure this is 100% doable right now with existing technology.

Tech is a double-edged sword.

I also could think of anti-human-targeting weapons to stop or neutralize those vehicles.

Everything is possible.

Shh.... don't give them ideas.

burqas for everyone, here we come

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