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Comment by unlikelymordant | Hacker News Reader

Putting stickers on road signs can trick humans too...

In fact, road signs are just stickers on a bit of metal themselves.

This was my thought as well. And I think it is an important fact to keep in mind. You can fool an AI by putting a sticker on a stop sign, but then again you can fool a human by stealing the entire stop sign.

Either way you're defacing infrastructure in a way that's potentially dangerous. It's just that the particular failure cases for an AI is different (and somewhat incomprehensible) to humans.

Of course, a self driving system could also be linked to a network that has redundant information about the road and could also broadcast its position and immediate intent to all other nearby self driving systems.

Now, on the other hand. If a police officer sees a missing stop sign, then it's pretty obvious that there is something that needs to be reported and addressed. However, if there's a small sticker on a stop sign (possibly something even confusable as just dirt or bird poop) then it might not be obvious that this represents a road hazard.

I think the important distinction is that humans aren’t confused by the stickers that confuse “self-driving” technology. The stickers in the article, for example, are unlikely to confuse a human.

Although the article didn't say which stickers were used - they __implied__ that the signs shown fooled the vehicles but they didn't state it explicitly. Who knows, maybe they stuck 65 mile/hour speed limit sign over a stop sign.

You’re right; I think these are the actual ones[1]. My intuition is that a human is equally unlikely to be fooled by these stop sign modifications, although the curve warning sign might fool someone at night.

[1]: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15340148/researchers-find...

Stop sign has a unique shape for the reason. Humans would recognise it by shape only – and that's the reason for it being unique. Even if it is covered in snow, you know that's it is the STOP sign. Similarly, the bottom-up triangle can only mean "yield".

Who knows, maybe they stuck 65 mile/hour speed limit sign over a stop sign.

That wouldn't fool a person. People use a massive amount of contextual data, historical knowledge, and common sense to interpret the world around them. A random out-of-place sign like a 65mph marker at a junction where a stop sign might be isn't enough to trick someone.

Self-driving cars probably won't ever be as good as a person at this. That's fine because we're able to accept a small risk if the reward is enough of a benefit. Law-makers should be considering it and making "tampering with a road sign" a much more serious explicit crime that's worse than just basic vandelism though.

That increases the danger of self driving cars over people but there are other situations where self driving is safer.

When discussing this I don't hear the positives

This is such a non-starter type of argument.

This isn't kindergarten or a 1on1 meeting where you wrap the negative comments in positive comments. This is a harsh review of a piece of tech being touted as the next coming yet has such horrible faults that it can't be anything but a hobby project at best. This has the ability to kill people because of these faults, so telling bobbyDriverlessCar that he did pretty good, but has one area that needs improvement because you don't want to destroy bobbyDriverlessCar's over inflated ego is just a dumb way to think of this.

In kindergarten you don't weigh the positives and negatives

Sure but these look like the sort of thing that would be a low probability to fix where as something that’d fool humans would be at least a high priority (not gonna say every town would fix it quickly)

Also something that fools humans about street signs would probably also fool AI

On almost all yes, but the stop sign has a unique shape.

as always there is a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1958/

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