I don’t know. I’d start by checking news reports if I cared to know. I suspect, given the doctrine of “Qualified Immunity” and the suspect’s crime spree that day, that a lawsuit will fail (if the department / city doesn’t choose to settle beforehand).
While it is true that autonomous piloting systems are going to have to deal with the complexities and illogic of human operators, they also have the benefit of all-around perception and quick responses to help avert accidents from aggressive drivers, and also to provide an objective record of these events for future review and citation or prosecution in the case of actions that are illegal or put other people in harm’s way. Once autonomous vehicles become reliable enough to be demonstrably better at avoiding accidents than human drivers—and once they get to a certain threshold of performance and prediction capability this will happen quickly—there will almost certainly be a a push by both insurers and public safety advocates to pressure for greater restrictions or training requirements to obtain a manual driving certification. Eliminating the human (and most distractible and affective) element of driving leading to accidents is going to cause a drive in adoption of proven systems, provided there is some objective standard to assess and demonstrate reliability.
The systems and techonology currently used for autonomous piloting systems are in their infancy, and in the case of Uber it is becoming apparent that these vehicles were deployed despite strong indications that they were not ready for testing on public roads and with an explicit indifference to public safety. This doesn’t reflect the ultimate benefits of autonomous vehicles any more than the Model T reflected the speed, reliabily, and performance of the modern automobile.
Stranger
There are places in America today where (some) people are afraid to walk the street at night. So the idea is not at all comical.
Interesting didn’t realize that.
Though its not really a fair comparison statistically speaking, comparing one death to 36000 (what is the variance of that? standard deviation?). Though same of course goes for comparing zero deaths to 36000 and saying it’s safe.
I don’t even think we need to wait for AI cars to see people taking advantage of the collision avoidance technology to be traffic bullies. The sensors in many newer cars have made my radar detector almost obsolete, I just turn it off, “Oh, that is a new Subaru I am following”.
Last week I was in a slow merge situation in town, maybe 15 miles per hour, and the guy next to me tried to pinch me off, so I just went ahead and slow-mo’d into the lane anyway and he had the choice of hitting me or letting me merge. Yeah, I got a horn honked at me.
In the very near future, when many cars have active collision avoidance sensors, and others do not, an aggressive driver will only need to activate the collision avoidance of the other car to open up a space. Just muscle your way in and the other car will make room, without input from the driver. I can see a freeway situation with some cars in autonomous mode and other drivers without, taking advantage of the AI cars. Smart cars really only work if ALL cars are smart. We will have some growing pains when there is a mixture on the road.
Back to the OP. What happens when a autonomous car’s passengers are surrounded by an angry mob? That’s why we keep the 2nd amendment.
Not true. When you change the incentives or behaviour of the agents in a complex system, the system itself will change and adapt. Maybe for the better, maybe not. And there’s no way to know until it happens. A system where cars can be pushed out of the way by aggressive drivers is not the same as one where aggressive drivers are constrained by uncertainty and social cues.
This is not how to do safety engineering analysis. In fact, it was exactly this type of thinking that led to the Shuttle disasters.
To analyze the safety of a system, you have to look at all the ways in which the system ran beyond its control limits and did something unexpected - regardless of whether it led to a fatality or not. And so far, the autonomous cars have had a LOT of failures. I have heard that Uber’s test program has required drivers to intervene on average once every 13 miles. There have been numerous reported failures where cars went off the road, or slowly bumped another car, or ran into the side of a bus, or in other ways deviated from expected behaviour.
No, some of them were troubling failures of AI. For example, a Tesla crashed into a white semi trailer at high speed. It didn’t even try to brake. It turns out that the truck was silhouetted against a light sky, and the AI just ddn’t recognize it as an obstacle.
A safety engineer doesn’t dismiss that by saying, 'Hey, we told the driver to keep his hands on the wheel. So our system is fine." That’s an argument a lawyer might use in court, but a safety engineer should be thinking, 'we didn’t think that would happen. We have overlooked something, or we are more confident than we should be that we can solve all the situations that might arise."
Probably best to not drive to those places then, huh? Or, if you have to drive into East St Louis to recreate that scene from Escape From New York, arm yourself like Snake Plissken.
Stranger
You say that like it’s a bad thing. Now, how do we get meatsack drivers to react the same way?
Cars without override systems - that therefore can’t be driven aggressively, can’t be driven non-aggressively, can’t be driven with any emotion at all - are the answer. They will be non-polite, non-aggressive, non-everything, and just get the job done. That will be a long time coming.
The cars have sensors, and the sensors have logs. I can certainly see where the logs of a car can be used in traffic court. If people are driving aggressively, they can be ticketed for that.
Hopefully, the angry mob didn’t remember the second amendment as well.
If this is really a problem, though, there are many solutions. Your autonomous car is not isolated. It is in communication with traffic control systems, and maybe even the company that you bought/rented/liveried from. If you hit the panic button, then they may be able to see the situation, and take control over the car remotely.
Does no one remember the incident where a group of menacing motorcyclists brake-checked a car with a young couple and small child inside, forcing it to stop. The gang dismounted and threateningly surrounded the car, forcing the driver to floor the gas pedal and run over (and permanently paralyze) a biker who was run over in the process. People get menaced in their cars all the time, especially in today’s street crime culture. We just don’t hear about such instances because street crime is so common these days and the instances so numerous that they don’t warrant publication.
And to take the OP’s scenario a bit further, what about what happens when a self-driving car is setting at a stoplight and an attempted hijacking occurs, either at gunpoint or by force such as a crowbar or ball bat to a window. The car’s programmed to wait out the light, so what then?
Looks to me like a manual override is the obvious and only solution.
The OP presents an extremely rare scenario. I can’t think of any time in my life I’ve actually seen anything like this happen in real life. Sure, it’s possible that it could happen, if you drop the assumption that people are generally NOT psychopaths with murderous intent for no reason.
Obligatory xkcd, #1958 Self-Driving Issues
Hahahahahaha…oh fuck it, there are not enough ha’s in my keyboard to convey how hard this made me laugh.
If this wave of carjackings is so ignored by the MSM, how did you hear about them, hmmm?
Currently driving is much safer than walking, in terms of being a crime victim. I am pointing out that self driving cars will change that. You have never seen anyone call a cab or get a ride for a walkable distance for this reason?
The most recent example was reported in the local news. Brazen too, it was. Five guys stopped their car right in the middle of a busy intersection with three lanes each way (including left turn lanes) and half a mile from the police station and attempted to hijack a car sitting at the stop light.
But having said that, I said nothing about a ‘wave’ of hijackings. They and other mostly unreported incidents of street crime have been going on for a long time.
And I, myself, was subject to an attempted hijacking one night in an instance I posted about here. Two young guys pulled even with me as I was driving down the street late one night and tried in a faux-panicked manner to convince me that something was terribly wrong with my truck, that it was throwing off sparks like crazy and about to catch fire. I, not being nearly as stupid as many of the Dopery would have one believe, instantly knew they were full of it. Anything scraping badly enough to be throwing off sparks like that would make making considerable noise also and yet there wasn’t a sound. Nor was there any feel of friction in the floorboard or steering wheel, and looking down through the window at the road next to me there was no light.
So I thanked them and told them I’d check it out. They looked most puzzled and tried again. “No shit, man, your car’s about to blow up!” Again I said okay, thanks, I’ll check it out. So they gave up and pulled ahead and over into a left turn lane. I pulled up in the outside lane and looked over to see the guy in the passenger seat glaring at me. I asked just where the sparks were coming from, the front, the center, the rear, where? The driver who’d been doing all the talking leaned forward and yelled that it was “everywhere” and I needed to stop. The light changed and they slowly went through the intersection waiting to see if I was going to stop, which of course I didn’t. Then once they were out of sight I turned down a residential street checking to see if I could see any light coming from under my truck in an area where it was more dark, and to see if any scraping sound bounced back from the curbing. Zero in both cases. So I turned around and headed back to the main road I’d been on previously and here they came going the other way. Obviously they’d doubled back and spotted me. I turned off on the main road and never saw them after that.
A friend knowledgeable in such things told me they were probably looking to jump me and steal my truck to use as a disposable getaway vehicle for use in a robbery, and that such things happen all the time.
I’m sure that had they been successful it would never have made even the local news, let alone the MSM.
I think you are (somewhat inaccurately) referring to the Hollywood Stuntz gang assault. The driver stopped after rear-ending the brake-checking motorcyclist, who sustained minor injuries.
Yes, and then subsequently either he or another biker was run over and paralyzed just like I said.
I have no idea what this post of yours is supposed to accomplish, other than to post one of your patented keeners upon having ferreted out some minor error regarding an insignificant detail.
The fact remains that it’s hardly ridiculous to pose scenarios where people might be trapped and subject to victimization while stopped (or being stopped) in a self-driving vehicle.
But as I am not designing , nor have ever designed, a self driving car or space shuttle this is not a problem.
Primarily, it was supposed to accomplish (and did successfully accomplish) the provision of an accurate identification with link of the event that you citelessly introduced with a general appeal about whether anybody else remembered it. No need to thank me, though.
Anyway, we’re all very late to the party on discussion of the “Hollywood Stuntz gang assault” incident, as the concurrent “When should a person have the right to drive thru a crowd of demonstrators?” GD thread has been talking about it since this post yesterday. There, the guy who brought up the incident did manage to post a link.
While it’s ever so kind of you to follow me around the board to seek out minor things in my posts to correct, you could have simply posted a link to the story along with a comment to that effect if that was your true motivation. But the reality is that you wanted to get in a little dig about my post being “somewhat inaccurate”. You aren’t fooling anyone.
But be that as it may, I felt the story had gotten enough publicity so as to be familiar to most and easily searchable to anyone wanting to investigate it. Posters aren’t required to post links, you know. In cases like this whether to post one or not is optional, and to save time I chose not to. Nothing at all wrong with that.