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Comment by mint2 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been curious what happens if a very red ball is suspended in front of rectangular cardboard about 7 ft up. No person would mistake it for a signal, but what about these “self driving” cars?

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I also wonder what would happen if someone had a t-shirt with a "20kmh" sign on the back and was walking down the sidewalk.

...especially since new cars are required to recognize speed signs and warn the drivers or even slow down in EU.

i suspect the reason why all these years these cars operate only in like half dozen locations is that these locations have been and probably continuously are being expensively mapped to death in greatest detail (to avoid accidents and bad PR). Otherwise they would have been testing in many more locations.

Definitely, all the self driving car companies have been driving around SF for years gathering data. I think Waymo even advertised it “got to know the neighborhood and peoples routines” as part of training.

People's routines, huh? Next thing you know you'll get Google ads for divorce lawyers because the car has noticed your wife's car parked not outside the yoga school, but next to this dude's car outside the Holiday Inn every 3rd Thursday of the month...

As if people aren't already being served ads based on their Android device gathering the exact same data plus even more.

If you hire through the ad you get the surveillance data bundled. And people say targeted advertising doesn't create value.

For sure, I have seen this confirmed by a Waymo employee on HN. I think some people are vastly overestimating how close we are to widespread AVs, since they don't realize how narrow the successes are so far.

I once saw a video of a Tesla interpreting a reddish moon as an infinite series of red lights.

I saw a video of the screen showing this massive array of stop signs and it was ignoring them all. Can’t remember what was causing it.

I assume the cars have a database of existing traffic lights.

And run any new traffic lights put up if they aren't in the database yet?

so they probably re-map this stuff on a very regular basis, that's why it's kept to limited locations because of cost of this

I would hope there are special cases for handling construction/lane closure temporary traffic lights, for instance.

They've stopped because the moon looked like a traffic light. I don't think it'd be hard to trick them with just about anything. A red LED hung in front of the camera with tape and pipe cleaners might be enough.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that deliberately messing with autonomous cars to cause an accident is an act of terrorism and should be prosecuted as such.

Terrorism would’ve been a lot easier if they could’ve tricked the planes into flying themselves into buildings. Terrorists have it so easy these days.

You are saying that it would be easier to cause chaos, but I'm not sure. I can imagine various ways of tampering with roads to cause disaster irrespective of the cars being self-driving.

Putting a cone on the hood? Terrorism? Damn, that slope sure got slippery.

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