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Comment by abhishek0318 | Hacker News Reader

If we are to mass deploy self driving cars, we must solve this problem. No one would want to travel by cars that could be tricked so easily.

This also leads to a moral and legal questions. If a self driving car injures someone, who will be responsible, the person owning the car or the manufacturer?

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I think Volvo mentioned at some point that when they released fully self driving cars the responsibility would be on them as long as the car was in autonomous mode.

Since then I think they've postponed the plans for fully automatic driving though.

There's no need to completely solve it. It just needs to happen statistically less often than human failures. And I believe this won't be hard.

Well currently the attacks work 100% of the time.

“No one would want to travel by cars that could be tricked so easily.”

https://xkcd.com/1958/

That cartoon seems naive to me, in that one might be concerned about self-driving cars being vulnerable to malicious activity that scales in a way that attacks against human-driven cars don't.

Spreading tyre piercing shrapnel out your window on a busy motorway scales pretty well I imagine. Luckily moth people have better things to do with their time!

The attacks that scale are unlikely to involve fooling the object detection pipeline by manipulating its input (because you need to physically modify the environment to do that), but rather something like compromising the firmware update servers, stealing the signing key and pushing a remote killswitch.

So the weak point in this case isn't the fragility of machine learning against adversarial inputs, but old-fashioned network security.

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