Why would it be easier for trouble-makers to fool autonomous cars? As a human driver, I'd be fooled by pretty much any road marking or guy in an orange vest.
It’s amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ( accidents every year) but absolutely not for machine/autonomous vehicles, even when, statistically speaking, machines may make better decision much faster(or at-least no worse than human judgement)... I guess feeling/perception of being in control is more important to us...
Other interesting observation I find in every autonomous vehicle discussion is, how we only focus on edge cases... when in reality every tool that we use (including the car we been driving) today are built for general use case and operate under mostly a control environment.
Rather if we think autonomous car as additional pair of eyes and hands when we need it most might serve us well in short run before the technology gets mature over next decade or two.
I’ll be really happy and relaxed if my car can mostly (70-80%) drive it self to daily commute or next trip to LA; expecting it to be my chauffeur is bit too much, personally.
Maybe it works for long haul trucking though.
amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ... but absolutely not for machine
Also, when a human driver's negligence results in injury or severe damage, criminal charges result. That's a deterrent. With autonomous driving, you can't prosecute an algorithm.
would "use at your own risk" vindicate the company behind autonomous vehicle? or owner is responsible for his vehicle's actions? i guess never in the history, we had so much advance automations in direct hands of consumer...
As for the failure, I have reasons to disagree... if autonomous cars are working under "unsupervised learnings", my assumptions is, it most likely will makes different decisions for same scenarios based on data on hand.... so thousand's of failure events... though it may look similar may or may not end in same results... similar to how we would react when faced to some unknown situation on road... your scenario might more likely to play out for bad batch of hardware devices/sensors/lidar/camera etc in autonomous system...
If it's sold as fully autonomous, i.e. significantly beyond Tesla's system today, I don't see how the manufacturer could not have the liability. How comfortable would you be to use a car that could expose you to severe criminal liability because some company made a mistake with their software?
The company responsible would also have a clear incentive to alter/destroy any damning evidence gathered in telemetry.
Not saying it doesn't happen. But now you've gone from a product liability case which rarely has individual criminal consequences to actions that clearly do.
If/when we get to this point, it will be "interesting" though. Outside of maybe the medical area, there aren't many examples of consumer-facing products that, when used as directed, kill people because sometimes "stuff happens." And people generally understand that's just the way it is.
It's not out of the realm of possibility to imagine government-approved autonomous driving systems that insulate everyone involved from liability so long as they're used and maintained as directed. See e.g. National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. I'm not sure it's likely but it might become a possibility if manufacturers find they're too exposed.
There's a caveat here that this 70-80% must be contiguous and the car must be superhuman-level reliable in that segment. Otherwise, the "additional pair of eyes and hands" significantly increase the danger. If your car suddenly decides that it can't handle something and asks you to take over in the last second, you won't be able to handle it either.
Which is actually a big win as long highways drives are boring and probably have a decent chunk of more serious accidents.
It doesn't give you the robo-taxi use cases that are what a lot of urbanites care about the most. But it would be a nice safety and comfort add-on for how a lot of people spend many hours of their weeks.
Like any risk, you also need to consider the impact of getting it wrong. If an audio assistant gives you the wrong answer to the population of your hometown, no big deal. But if your car thinks everything is okay and drives you into a stationary fire truck on the shoulder of a freeway when you are travelling at 70mph, the downside of that edge case is infinitely worse.
Sure, humans can make these mistakes, too. But the fact is that your notional world where computers are able to make smarter decisions than humans about how to drive doesn't actually exist. No one has figured out how to make it work. And they won't anytime soon. They've solved all the easy parts. But it turns out there's a lot more involved in driving than all the billions of dollars poured into the problem so far can figure out.
My point is, computer with,
- more data, (historic on how to act on certain situation, live data for event i.e. sensor data, lidar/radar data, images) vs human driver who would not have access or the ability to process these.
- faster and parallel processing vs human driver
- single focus/goal (of driving from x to y safely and making appropriate decisions to achieve it) vs human driver (with "physical limitations", "emotions", "hormones" and other things that makes up "life") is more likely to be distracted...
computer with all of above advantages compared to human driver may able to make better informed decision much faster than human driver can do (and when it doesn't it's hard to know/prove if human driver would consistently make better decision every time for same situation)
having said above, I agree that tech is in its infancy and it's gonna take a decade or two to be matured and even after that human intervention just in time in some cases would be needed but for the most controlled/learned environment (which is 70-80% of total driving on day to day basis) these systems would be immensely helpful.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/6ofa63/dont_turn_your...
Note that self driving vehicles aren't different from humans in that respect, except they see much farther.
So, it takes a lot more work on the programming side to compensate.
Imagine someone hacking the 'construction zone protocol' and spoofing thousands of cars into thinking they're in a construction zone at once. You'd be hard pressed to fool thousands of geographically separated human drivers at the same time.
That only works if a police car doesn't come by and catch the perpetrator in the act.
With a wireless communication to automated drivers, someone could plausibly feed bad information from a hidden or otherwise remote location.
Beyond that, just as automation allows human-intensive processes to scale by removing the humans, fooling automated drivers can scale much more readily than fooling human drivers.
As soon as it becomes a robot, a lot of the social pressure to be a good person falls away. Less so if there are people inside, but I can see empty autonomous cars being given a pretty hard time just for kicks.