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Comment by escapegoat | Hacker News Reader

My kneejerk, not thought through notion: why not require an emergency override protocol be builtin to road using robots? No thoughts on how this would work exactly, but it would let emergency workers move robot vehicles out of the way.

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Theres already an emergency override protocol, you see the lights or hear the siren and then get out of the ambulance's way.

How do you propose to build something like that where it’s actually limited to just emergency workers?

This is like the fire keys for elevators. You can find them on eBay.

It's not too hard to implement them with cryptographic protocols to prevent duplication and apply time/location restrictions to them. Moreover if you really wanted to steal a car, there are much easier ways of doing that, like buying a replica gun on aliexpress then going to your nearest intersection.

The problem is not really that they can get stolen, but remote control, like a bad person gaining access to the car to hit people or something like that.

>like a bad person gaining access to the car to hit people or something like that.

That can be eliminated by not giving direct control and something closer to what Waymo "Remote Assistance Agents" have access to: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

Not every social problem needs a technical solution. You can steal cars now, this is solved foremost by most people not being thieves and then second the existence of police for the few people that are.

First thought would be to have the remote human over watching to engage with an emergency responder when the override is used. The remote human can then decide whether it is a real emergency or not. Either way, if any one uses an override system, a remote human should get involved. But instead, computer devs will suggest crypto/public/private keys/blahblahblah. This is one of those where the best answer will be to boot up the bio computer running the latest software

It doesn't sound difficult to solve. The sensors can classify firetruck, ambulance, red&blues, uniformed police, badge, siren, etc. At a certain criteria, they can unlock the driver door for normal human driving, perhaps for a very limited speed and distance. The officer can move it to the side, and if they crash it's not waymo crashing it. This override should send the an alert to the remote command center, so a human can watch the video and also decide how much further they can drive it. Since passenger safety is a concern, if there is a passenger inside who chooses to remain inside, the car should remain locked and not allow any driver in. The human can decide to follow police orders to exit the car, or remain inside, but at that point a human becomes responsible for obstructing. The whole freezing waymo trend seems driven by legal liability - not engineering. They know if they always freeze, their million miles with no accidents stats are safe.

Cops can't move vehicles that they don't own because of liability. The only way for them to move a vehicle without liability is to use a tow truck.

I mean liability can be defined, we are writing new laws for these things. Cops that need to move autonomous are not liable for any damages.

I do think that theres needs to be better handling of emergency vehicles and autonomous vehicles. Someone needs to spend some serious time thinking through how to handle this better because this situation was not okay.

> Cops can't move vehicles that they don't own because of liability. The only way for them to move a vehicle without liability is to use a tow truck.

While the precise boundaries of liability depend on the laws of the particular jurisdiction (they aren't consistent across the whole US) police generally can take reasonable action to move vehicles obstructing the road in an emergency without liability for any damages incurred, whether or not they use a tow truck to do it.

And every single day you hear about someone abusing them right? Or no?

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