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Comment by orbitur | Hacker News Reader

> I won't be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road.

Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror?

In all seriousness, my fear (and maybe not fear, maybe it's happy expectation in light of the nightmare scenarios) is that if a couple of the "weird and terrifying" accidents happen, the gov't would shut down self-driving car usage immediately.

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I am definitely not. Their version of the future is too damn bleak for me.

Your fear is very much grounded in reality. US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws. So it won't take much to have restrictions imposed like this. Granted, I believe some regulation is good; after all the reason today's cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn't because the free market decided so, but because of regulation. But self driving cars are so new and our lawmakers are by and large so ignorant, that I wouldn't trust them to create good regulation from the get go.

> the reason today's cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn't because the free market decided so, but because of regulation.

All safety functionality was introduced and used way before regulators even knew that it's possible.

Edit: please explain the downvotes, ideally with examples

Largely because of Ralph Nader.

It's amazing how reformers get demonized even after their platform is accepted wholesale by the rest of the world.

> except in rare cases like gun laws

They're still very reactionary in that, which is precisely why it isn't very effective when a subset of them do react: there are plenty of smart things that could get proposed, but the overlap between people who know what they're talking about and people that want the laws is exceptionally small, so consequently dumb, ineffective stuff that has no chance of passing anyway gets proposed. What does get proposed is a knee-jerk reaction to what just happened, and rarely actually looks systemically at the current laws and gun violence as a whole. Example: the Las Vegas shooting prompted a lot of talk of bump stock bans. Bump stocks are so rarely used at all, nevermind in violence, and they will generally ruin guns that weren't originally made to be fully-automatic very quickly if they're actually used for sustained automatic fire. Silly point to focus on suddenly. After the Florida shooting last month so much focused on why rifles are easier to obtain than handguns. And it's because overwhemingly most gun violence is handguns. Easily concealable rifles are already heavily regulated at the federal level for that very reason.

> Example: the Las Vegas shooting prompted a lot of talk of bump stock bans. Bump stocks are so rarely used at all, nevermind in violence, and they will generally ruin guns that weren't originally made to be fully-automatic very quickly if they're actually used for sustained automatic fire.

<off-topic> This is non-sense. Typical semi-auto are wayyy over build. Unless mechanical wear or explicit tempering of the disconnector, there is no risk whatsoever to fire thousands of rounds with a bump stock. Actually, plastic/wood furniture are more likely to burn/melt before the mechanical parts will actually fail. As worst, you might bend a gas piston, but the rifle will otherwise be fine.

The underlying reasoning behind the push against the bump stock ban is that it was basically a semi-auto ban, as you can trivially with a bit of training bump fire any semi-auto without a bump stock from either the shoulder or the hip with a mere finger. </off-topi>

>> you might bend a gas piston

Tubes on low- to mid- range civilian DE guns can burn out very quickly, and are in fact designed to do so long before you get damage to the more expensive parts of the gun - I've seen it happen in most of the cases (which are admittedly quite few in number despite how often I'm there) where I've seen someone using a bump stock at a range. In the most recent case I think the guy was on his 3rd mag and it ruptured. It was a M&P 15 Sport II, if I recall. Not a cheap no-name brand, but about as low-cost as you can get and missing all the upgrades in the version they market to cops. High-end ARs would fair better, I'd expect, but high-end ARs are again so rarely used for actual violence because they're usually only purchased by people shooting for a serious hobby in stable life situations. And honestly I feel the same people buying those probably feel bump stocks are tacky and gaudy like I do.

Even in the most liberal interpretation of the proposed law, I don't think any bump stock ban would become a semi-auto ban. I could see the vague language getting applied to after-market triggers, especially ones like Franklin Armory, but you've gotta have some added device for any of the proposals I've seen to even remotely apply.

US lawmakers are very reactionary in the case of gun laws too, it's just that gun owners usually have enough political pull to block them from successfully getting laws passed. (The current campaign for gun control is 100% a reactionary response to whatever's been making the biggest news headlines. For example, the vast majority of US gun homicides are carried out with handguns, yet gun control supporters seem to think it's absurd they're more tightly regulated than AR-15s - which are relatively rarely used to kill anyone and have more mundane uses for things like hunting - just because the AR-15s are in the headlines. The US's most deadly school shooting was done with handguns too.) In fact, I'd argue the reactionary nature of US lawmaking is important to understanding why "sensible", "common-sense" gun control laws are so strongly opposed in the first place.

> US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws.

And for a good reason, they are constitutionally prohibited to .

> Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror?

In Black Mirror, all cars in the world will simultaneously swerve into nearby pedestrians, buildings, or other cars.

That could happen during a massive, remotely-triggered software update.

Like the one that happened some days ago with Occulus helmets.

Just imagine a batch of cars with malfunctioning inertial sensors (it's brought down more than a few of my drones). GPS and perception (through ML or LIDAR) will work most of the time to override such errors, but if there was a second malfunction... "The car is swerving left at 1m/s; correct right."

That could happen because of a malicious 'time-bomb' placed by a hostile state actor in such an update.

It doesn't even need to be that. Imagine the shit show that a city would be when it's entire transportation fleet is immobilized because someone has messed with their safety features.

More likely it would be something about dissidents being killed in their cars, or cars going after people who aren't liked.

If that's bad, what happens when the robocars get hacked?

Like we have botnets made out of thousands (millions?) of compromised computers, we could have entire fleets of compromised cars, rentable on the black market using cryptocurrency, that could be used to commit crimes (e.g. homicide) while keeping the killer anonymous.

Scary stuff. I hope these self-driving cars will be able and designed to work while completely offline, with no built-in way to ever connect to a network. But given the biggest player in the field seems to be Google, they'll probably be always connected in order to send data to the mothership and receive ads to show you.

Using these cars to commit homicide was actually one of the plot points in the second book of Three Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin. Very much recommended if you are into sci-fi.

Those books are interesting in that Liu seems to get away with seriously portraying narratives that would be out of bounds in the "approved" popular culture of the West. Murder by robocar is a minor example, but others include portrayal of the inherent weakness of societies in which men are effeminate and the superiority of leaving strategic decisions to military authorities. (I don't particularly agree with those propositions, but they are certainly present in the books.)

I'm half-way done with the last book in the trilogy and I am finding the assumptions and viewpoints of the world from a Chinese view quite interesting. The one that struck me most was how he presents humanities greatest strength over the technologically superior aliens is the human ability to conceal their true thoughts and the possibility of deception. Quite different from Christianity's high value placed on honesty.

The great stories of paganism and animism were composed by artists, and they all feature trickery and uncertainty. The Christian Bible has some of that (I like Job), but the majority was written by humorless unimaginative prudes. I suppose some of the Chinese philosophers are a little better than St. Paul, but mostly when they're being playful.

> receive ads to show you

I'm just envisioning a scenario where the car automatically pulls to the side of the highway, locks the doors and dishes you with a 15 second ad, and then the doors unlock and the journey resumes as normal.

Or just (virtually) replace billboards with personalized content

"I hope these self-driving cars will be able and designed to work while completely offline, with no built-in way to ever connect to a network."

Don't hold your breath about that. There will be a huge load of data ready to be sold to advertising companies just by listening what passengers talk about when passing near areas/stores/billboards/events etc.

Confused by the downvote here. This is a perfectly legitimate question, and indeed it should be asked more, not less, often.

This is stupid question. The answer is - the same as if someone will physically mess with your car.

Physical hacking can only happen to one car at a time.

What if someone hacks the assembly line for Ford?

What if someone put a bomb in your car or mess with your breaks?

Right, but what if someone could put a bomb in 100k cars or mess with 100k car's breaks remotely over the internet. A large enough quantitative change becomes a qualitative change.

To be fair, all the examples you gave could also happen to a human driver.

will never happen. least not with any explicit depth sensors. any car with lidar has depth perception orders of magnitude better than yours and would never chase an object merely because it resembles road markings

I mean, maybe the self-driving car shouldn't exist if it's just going to run people over.

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