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What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now? Sometimes common sense helps, but it you're out to cause c
by cameronh90 7y ago
What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now? Sometimes common sense helps, but it you're out to cause chaos, there's a ton of things you can do today that would cause crashes - but most of the time, people don't.
- aetherson 7y agoIf you destroy a yield sign, maybe it will eventually cause some problems, or maybe not. We could imagine a world in which destroying smart infrastructure could pretty instantaneously and reliably cause massive traffic jams, which seems like it would appeal more to certain trolls and perhaps protestors. We could also imagine a world in which more subtle attacks could reliably and fairly quickly cause injury/fatality accidents, which might appeal to terrorists.
- jameslevy 7y agoI think this type of "stress testing" of destroyed or modified signage would be an obvious direction for AV development once the basics are down. With HD mapping and other technology used to augment what is gathered by their sensors, AVs are eventually overall going to be better at handling unexpected scenarios at the road compared to humans
- TwoBit 7y agoIf you destroy a yield sign, the system will immediately know because all the cars previously recorded it.
- incompatible 7y agoThe permanent signs would already be in the database. The signs you'd worry about would be temporary, for road works or accidents, but perhaps these locations could be made electronically available.
- blub 7y agoAnd it will play a helpful message like "Recalculating route: 3 self-driving fatalities registered at this location."
- kohtatsu 7y agoSo presumably every self-driving vehicle is going to be constantly streaming all sorts of information in their purview to a central hub? That is a privacy nightmare without regulation on scrubbing extraneous information, done before upload: for example blocking out of pedestrian data; not just faces but clothing and gait, and probably also any data captured through windows. It would be ideal to have a limited view of just the roads and signage, and have a retention plan that gradually keeps less and less historical data. For accident review more of the data might be required, so vehicles should keep the last 24 hours of raw data.
- kohtatsu 7y agoSelf-driving vehicles should be implemented with the same care Apple has given Touch ID and Face ID in regards to protecting sensitive data. Having a central database capable of being scraped and process to determine where any person is at any given time is a non-starter. Care needs to be taken to scrub all extraneous data from the fleet's network.
- alxlaz 7y agoA lot of things should be implemented in a particular way, but most aren't. Decades of practical experience show that, unless forced by regulations, auto manufacturer will pick the cheaper and more profitable option over the safe option every single time.
- aantix 7y agoIf I had to choose between privacy of my location or the convenience of a self driving car, I’d choose the car. Every single time. Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the supermarket.
- ozim 7y agoTell that to guy that had smartwatch and his wife noticed he had high heart rate somewhere at night where he should be doing something else. I don't have link for the story. But idea behind this is not that one should not cheat on his wife because he will get caught. To be really a human and be honest, one must not have an urge to cheat on his wife(husband) because he loves her. If someone has dirty thoughts and only thing that is preventing a person from fulfilling that is that "Tesla will know"... People should be able to cheat, they also should be caught, but being good only because you are constantly watched? This argument looks like "because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say".
- cglace 7y agoSo what happens when a road sign legitimately changes? Does the system use the previous values recorded or the new value? Im also curious how situations will be handled where there are two speed signs: the regular posted speed and a temporary speed for construction. How does it know which to obey.
- davewritescode 7y agoIdeally we get to a point where we’re at least publishing signage to a database so that cars don’t have to rely on visual cues both human and automated. I personally don’t think it’s possible to make automated cars work well without a ton of infrastructure support.
- Consultant32452 7y agoYour car wishes to inform you that there's a sign for McDonald's where they're having a sale 2 for 1 quarter pounder with cheese.
- gambiting 7y agoThe law doesn't require you to follow a sign that's not there. In fact I'd argue that doing so can be dangerous in some situations(and obviously advised in others). A car should only ever follow what it can actually see, which makes the whole idea almost daft, since computer image recognition is still so poor.
- rossmohax 7y agoIf there is a central database with all the signs, you don't need a physical sign on the edge on the road for AV to notice it, they already know it is "there" from that DB
- gambiting 7y agoBear in mind that's not how the traffic law works anywhere right now. You are only required to obey signs and markings which are actually there. And traffic signs get removed all the time for works, I honestly can't imagine that every action like that would be recorded in some central database that all cars could query.
- lopmotr 7y agoIf it's such a busy location to cause a big jam, how did the vandals get away with destroying it? In out of the way places, it won't cause a big jam.
- hilbertseries 7y agoFew places are busy in the middle of the night.
- humanrebar 7y agoYou can cause horrible traffic jams now by throwing a few mattresses or a bunch of caltrops onto the highway at the right time of day.
- orange8 7y agoThe yield signs could be backed up with an an official map all cars read from as well.
- iamshs 7y agoAnd then let that ‘official map’ from Google charge $100/month subscription fee.
- FooHentai 7y agoYou have to actually go out there and physically do the act. In a wired world the distance to everything is zero. If you can find an 'in', you can carry out this attack in any place in the world, from the comfort of your nerd cave or barracks.
- grawprog 7y ago>What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now? People do destroy yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now. I've known more than one person with an appropriated road or safety sign as a home decoration.
- asdff 7y agoPeople tag signs on the freeway, to the point where caltrans still has razor wire over some of the signs. It's already happening.
- j-c-hewitt 7y agoNothing and it happens all the time. This is something that a human driver familiar with the road will notice and it will be unlikely to cause an accident. An out-of-towner might get into an accident. An automated vehicle would ideally not even be looking at signs and just operating from its stored data.
- cbhl 7y agoThe obvious counterpoint to "operating from stored data" is an accident or construction causing a lane to be closed, or a child chasing a ball across the road.
- j-c-hewitt 7y agoIn the hypothetical world in which self driving cars are the norm and not the exception detours would be in the system so that SDCs would not need to read signs. Even now a lot of traffic maps get updated to show detours, delays, and temporary closures due to accidents. FWIW I am a near-term self-driving car skeptic and have been for a long time. I just think that these are not the kind of issues that really pose a major obstacle whereas drunk people wandering across the street are.
- tripzilch 7y agoWe will nano-tag alcohol and keep a database of all wandering drunks, for self-driving cars to either avoid them or take them home!
- gambiting 7y agoThat's an absolutely crazy idea. You are only required by law to follow signs that are actually there, full stop, a car should never rely on some built in database of data. I cannot imagine a database of signs that would be constantly up to date and somehow distributed to all cars on the road.
- j-c-hewitt 7y ago
- jsgo 7y agoI’ve seen intersections where people have went offroad in an accident and knocked down stop signs and people know when approaching that it should be there. Would a car? The only way I can see that working is if there is some kind of geographic location of various stops and the like, but at that point, you need consistent connectivity to obtain that kind of data, right? May work in larger towns and cities, but what about rural areas?
- tjohns 7y agoWe’ve had offline GPS units for decades. You could easily have a database of every stop sign, and it would fit on an SD card.
- GFischer 7y agoThey do that very often. I once drove the wrong way on a one-way street because some troll had changed the arrow's direction. Fortunately there was almost no traffic. Signs get vandalized or stolen all the time here in Uruguay. Mostly vandalized.