Posted on 03/04/2019 11:21:12 AM PST by ETL
Not what I understand from attending a presentation by someone who’s involved. It’s one thing operating a single autonomous vehicle, but operating a whole fleet in the same area apparently requires huge bandwidth and the U.S. is not up to it technologically.
China is, unfortunately, and they are taking the lead in this area—the speaker said they have been advocating that the U.S. get a move on so it doesn’t permanently lose the lead to China.
Well, that specifically, can’t happen. The traffic lights have what is called a “Malfunction Management Unit” - which is hard wired to look for “incompatible” light combinations, such as all being green.
https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/traffic-woot14.pdf
Intentional tripping of the MMU can often result (depending on manufacture/configuration) flashing yellow. All flashing yellows would be just as bad.
I thought I only imagined that movie.
Never saw it but the trailer creeped me out as a little kid.
They need to be hack proof.
I work in this area of tech.
While the argument of hacking an autonomous vehicle is a concern I’d like to point out that with modern connected vehicles it doesn’t have to be autonomous. Many of the systems in a car are now electrified, including steering, throttle, brakes - all on some sort of network. With the right hack I might be able to set off all the airbags in all Ford Mustangs and go wide-open-throttle at the same time.
Good architecture can attempt to limit the dangers with layers of security, e.g. separate networks and gateways for different things. That said, vehicle cyber security is a real problem, the amount of money that goes into it has to compete against money going toward new features customers are demanding. How many have “cyber security” at the top of their next vehicle check list? ...so you can guess the level of priority it gets.
Ask yourself - how many different vendors provide software that goes into any given vehicle model? The OEM won’t be able to answer that question. How much of the software was written (and reused since) before vehicles were getting connected? Again, good luck getting answers. We have things like “secure boot” (tamper detect) of compute devices but there’s no “secure chain of trust” established between all the various vendors providing software (that is then integrated into a system).
As for those pointing out the challenges with autonomous driving against “nuanced” use-cases, this is the difference between the autonomy levels - Level 1 (basic driving assistance) through Level 5 (can handle all situations). I don’t know anybody believing in L5 anytime soon but L4 is already happening, things are out of research and are now in active production initiatives. Level 3 is already in production (Audi A8, Tesla) - effectively “highway chauffeurs”. As the compute power becomes available they’ll just be able to handle more and more - but being able to tell the driver they’ll need to take over when necessary.
Personally I’d like to see the technology applied to making me a safer driver first, actively intervene if I’m going to hit stuff. Mitigating drunk and distracted drivers would cause death rates to plummet - but I still want to drive and I still want to be able to turn it all off if I chose to.
Bingo.
I would argue that all-yellow isn’t just as bad...but in general I’d also argue that units that are susceptible to this are not doing their intended job.
In NYC, the cab drivers will work to kibosh their use, so for that matter will mass transit demagogues. I think the tech that makes sense involves certain kinds of braking assists, such as those feel-good ads that have been on for a number of years already, where the kid in the crosswalk's life is saved by the robotic braking hooked to radar or whatever.
But democrats get more voters.
Imagine the asymmetric warfare implications for hacked self driving vehicles.
It may be true that the systems will be able to function without outside control, but it will also be true that government regulations will require that the capability for outside control will be provided in those systems.
Can see the hacked cars going 80 miles a hour through school zones with sadistic midget minds whooping it up on the internet.
5G Tech is here already, just stick your head in the microwave oven.
On a positive note 5G will take care of the rat problem in large cities, although probably it won’t affect the cockroaches.
Great Scott!
Haha, nice. :D
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