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Human-driven cars can also be disabled with a laser pointer to the eye of the driver. http://www.livescience.com/21707-lasers-eye-damage.html http://www.livesc

Human-driven cars can also be disabled with a laser pointer to the eye of the driver. http://www.livescience.com/21707-lasers-eye-damage.html http://www.livescience.com/21707-lasers-eye-damage.html

ryanmcbride 11y ago
Last Halloween on my commute home, someone on a hill had one of those super strong green laser pointers and got me right in the face. Can confirm.
A010 11y ago
Laser pointer can disable a human piloted aircraft too.
jerf 11y ago
And in general, I'm pretty sure I could drive in a sufficiently confusing way during my commute tomorrow to confuse human drivers enough to cause an accident that would have been theoretically avoidable if they had responded better. "Attacks" on self-driving cars that could already have been conducted on humans, and clearly aren't, because it just isn't worth anybody's time, aren't very technically interesting. One could make a case that there's a socially interesting aspect in that someone could use such an attack, in conjunction with social fears of self-driving cars, to do something like trash somebody's stock price or something, but the "social fear of self-driving cars" would be an irreducible element of such an attack. It's the attacks like the Jeep attack, where I can hit fleets at a time, because the cars are all intimately networked together or something, that are interesting.
- x5n1 11y ago
  You give a billion people these cars and I guarantee there will be attacks against the cars. Just like there are uncommon incidents of people trying to murder people by sabotaging their vehicles.
deleted 11y ago
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- modeless 11y ago
  That's not a difference. The self-driving cars stop if blinded too. Did you even read the article?
- calt 11y ago
  > The difference is human drivers will stop the car if blinded. So will the self driven cars, if you read the article.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      There's no guarantee human-driven cars will stop, either.
deleted 11y ago
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k_sze 11y ago
I think an important distinction is that a human driver under attack will likely know he/she is under attack very quickly, whereas the passengers in a self-driving car might not know that the self-driving system is under attack without significant delay.
- x5n1 11y ago
  Not to mention that the attack is undetectable. As there will be no witnesses and not recollection of who did the attack. So no legal deterrent to the would be attacker. This is a major problem.
- sound_of_basker 11y ago
  Specifically with high energy light sources outside of the visible spectrum, how will the human driver know?
  - k_sze 11y ago
    That's a good question. My guess is that either the driver's vision will be quickly impaired or his/her eyes will quickly start hurting. In that case, the driver will quickly know something is wrong even if he/she may not know it's an attack. I'm no expert on laser safety or human biology, so I left a question on biology SE: http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/38603/how-quickly-can-lasers-of-various-wavelengths-and-powers-impair-human-vision-or http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/38603/how-quickly... Hopefully somebody can give an answer. And if the driver experiences no symptom, then the attack is just ineffective.
mikeash 11y ago
Human driven cars can also be disabled with funny sounds or women wearing short skirts or a bit of spray paint on the road. We really need to remember that humans are atrocious at driving on average, and doing better than them is a pretty low bar. Not that we shouldn't strive to improve automation, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
- zzalpha 11y ago
  We really need to remember that humans are atrocious at driving on average, and doing better than them is a pretty low bar. Let's revisit that assertion when autonomous vehicles manage to even minimally cope with heavy rain or snow, neither of which are barriers for those "atrocious" human drivers.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    You must live in a place with much better drivers than we have around where I live.
    - zzalpha 11y ago
      A pithy answer that dodges the point. The reality is that, for all their flaws, humans vastly outperform autonomous vehicles in imperfect driving conditions. That's just reality, despite the HN tendency to pitch this technology as though it could replace all human drivers tomorrow.
      - mikeash 11y ago
        Maybe your bad example made it difficult to understand what point you were trying to make. :P My point is simply that there are tasks where human drivers outperform computers, and there are tasks where computers outperform human drivers, so simply looking at some scenario where humans do better doesn't tell us anything. You have to look at the whole picture. And yes, currently humans are way better than computers in the general case. I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying that "computers can't handle situation X, which humans can" is a pointless thing to say by itself.

Human-driven cars can also be disabled with a laser pointer to the eye of the driver. http://www.livescience.com/21707-lasers-eye-damage.html http://www.livescience.com/21707-lasers-eye-damage.html

ryanmcbride 11y ago

Last Halloween on my commute home, someone on a hill had one of those super strong green laser pointers and got me right in the face. Can confirm.

A010 11y ago

Laser pointer can disable a human piloted aircraft too.

jerf 11y ago

And in general, I'm pretty sure I could drive in a sufficiently confusing way during my commute tomorrow to confuse human drivers enough to cause an accident that would have been theoretically avoidable if they had responded better. "Attacks" on self-driving cars that could already have been conducted on humans, and clearly aren't, because it just isn't worth anybody's time, aren't very technically interesting. One could make a case that there's a socially interesting aspect in that someone could use such an attack, in conjunction with social fears of self-driving cars, to do something like trash somebody's stock price or something, but the "social fear of self-driving cars" would be an irreducible element of such an attack. It's the attacks like the Jeep attack, where I can hit fleets at a time, because the cars are all intimately networked together or something, that are interesting.

x5n1 11y ago
You give a billion people these cars and I guarantee there will be attacks against the cars. Just like there are uncommon incidents of people trying to murder people by sabotaging their vehicles.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

modeless 11y ago
That's not a difference. The self-driving cars stop if blinded too. Did you even read the article?
calt 11y ago
> The difference is human drivers will stop the car if blinded. So will the self driven cars, if you read the article.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    There's no guarantee human-driven cars will stop, either.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

k_sze 11y ago

I think an important distinction is that a human driver under attack will likely know he/she is under attack very quickly, whereas the passengers in a self-driving car might not know that the self-driving system is under attack without significant delay.

x5n1 11y ago
Not to mention that the attack is undetectable. As there will be no witnesses and not recollection of who did the attack. So no legal deterrent to the would be attacker. This is a major problem.
sound_of_basker 11y ago
Specifically with high energy light sources outside of the visible spectrum, how will the human driver know?
- k_sze 11y ago
  That's a good question. My guess is that either the driver's vision will be quickly impaired or his/her eyes will quickly start hurting. In that case, the driver will quickly know something is wrong even if he/she may not know it's an attack. I'm no expert on laser safety or human biology, so I left a question on biology SE: http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/38603/how-quickly-can-lasers-of-various-wavelengths-and-powers-impair-human-vision-or http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/38603/how-quickly... Hopefully somebody can give an answer. And if the driver experiences no symptom, then the attack is just ineffective.

mikeash 11y ago

Human driven cars can also be disabled with funny sounds or women wearing short skirts or a bit of spray paint on the road. We really need to remember that humans are atrocious at driving on average, and doing better than them is a pretty low bar. Not that we shouldn't strive to improve automation, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

zzalpha 11y ago
We really need to remember that humans are atrocious at driving on average, and doing better than them is a pretty low bar. Let's revisit that assertion when autonomous vehicles manage to even minimally cope with heavy rain or snow, neither of which are barriers for those "atrocious" human drivers.
- mikeash 11y ago
  You must live in a place with much better drivers than we have around where I live.
  - zzalpha 11y ago
    A pithy answer that dodges the point. The reality is that, for all their flaws, humans vastly outperform autonomous vehicles in imperfect driving conditions. That's just reality, despite the HN tendency to pitch this technology as though it could replace all human drivers tomorrow.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Maybe your bad example made it difficult to understand what point you were trying to make. :P My point is simply that there are tasks where human drivers outperform computers, and there are tasks where computers outperform human drivers, so simply looking at some scenario where humans do better doesn't tell us anything. You have to look at the whole picture. And yes, currently humans are way better than computers in the general case. I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying that "computers can't handle situation X, which humans can" is a pointless thing to say by itself.