How bad could it be?
Imagine what would happen of all of the lights were turned red at the same time. Now imagine all of them turned green.
Nature’s ‘reprogramming’ of idiots with cell phones does that, but it takes too long and is inconsistent. Also, there is the undue stress on the poor motorist who kills one of the dumbasses. (you can tell I have no sympathy for someone turned into a grease spot for crossing a street while talking on a phone)
As for hacking of self-driving vehicles? Am I the only one who thinks there won’t be some enterprising hacker out there who figures out a way to give his vehicle right of way and increase the speed at which it travels?
A few months back there was an article about self driving freight trucks. Imagine, a 100,000 lb big rig being hacked and smacking into a school.
This stuff is serious. Hacking a computer we lose information. Hacking vehicles we lose lives.
“First we need to “reprogram” the idiots that cross the street while playing with their smartphones..”
In both the programmed idiot and the vehicle human thinking is bypassed. What could go wrong?
The U.S. will never have self-driving cars. You need 5G technology to operate them, and the enviros are going to stop that.
Good reason to keep autonomous vehicles autonoumous, and free from internet control.
I oppose “driverless” cars, but they will happen anyway.
Forget about hacking by nerdy kids in Romania. What about the owner who messes with the software? What if he programs it to go 80 MPH and to go through red lights? What will the government do then? Execute the owner?
How do you tell a bunch of self driving cars to turn around and take a detour. Which car goes first? How do there digital brains make the decision? How do they know that a Hill is to Icy to even start to climb it. There are many such situations that one could think of.
An early Peter Weir film
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.
Imagine the asymmetric warfare implications for hacked self driving vehicles.
Can see the hacked cars going 80 miles a hour through school zones with sadistic midget minds whooping it up on the internet.
Great Scott!