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As a somewhat regular user of Waymo, these types of conversations seem like they're going to be more and more in the (sorry!) rearview mirror because we won't o

As a somewhat regular user of Waymo, these types of conversations seem like they're going to be more and more in the (sorry!) rearview mirror because we won't own the car nor the cameras that are recording the world as we "drive" around. That's not to say that we should give up fighting for some level of privacy even when we don't own the cars, but seems more likely that legislation would be passed that forces the vehicle owners/operators (Alphabet in the Waymo case) to blur peoples' faces. Then of course the state (police/gov/etc.) will clamor for a backdoor key that will unlock the blurred faces/bodies if a crime is suspected to have occurred. Speaking of, I wonder if Waymo already does blur people when they capture them through Waymo rides? I can't seem to find mention of it online. This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. Still not sure how their adoption plays out over time because, at least in the US, people will fight against mandates to use self-driving cars because it compromises their freedom (note that the freedom crowd (no judgment) will be saying that, at first, because they will consider it their right to drive themselves, but once the privacy implications are clear there will be full-on (figurative?) wars fought over self-driving). Guessing a politician, in Texas or another red state, will sooner than later enshrine the right-to-drive-oneself into the state constitution.

threecheese 2y ago
I am hoping for an urban camouflage fashion revolution as a response to more pervasive monitoring: https://www.axios.com/2019/09/07/fooling-facial-recognition-fashion https://www.axios.com/2019/09/07/fooling-facial-recognition-... Public access to object recognition models may be important.
- fasa99 2y ago
  surely there are simpler ways of course if you've dealt with most hoodish ruffians, as the names tells us, the people of the hood love to wear hoodies - which generally work quite well to hide from cameras, especially those above, if the hood sags forward and over the face somewhat or these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses or outside or alongside hoodies, these can be seen as socially acceptable (mostly) ; https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/07/mask-of-your-own-face.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/07/mask-of-your-own-fa...
- chefandy 2y ago
  I'd like to see that too, but time and time again we've seen that: a) laypeople aren't usually moved by privacy violations more abstract than someone physically watching you do something. b) most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy. c) safety gear generally isn't considered sexy I think that this stuff would be perceived like wearing a physical bike helmet for your data privacy with all the cachet of Google Glass.
  - lisper 2y ago
    > most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy. Ironic related story in the news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/08/29/passport-photos-makeup-security-tiktok/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/08/29/passport-ph...
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Also d) it's easier to update face recognition ML to see through the latest in camouflage fashion than to design, manufacture and sell new clothes after each update to the ML model. Especially that they need to keep fooling previous versions of the model too.
- zeven7 2y ago
  Surely object recognition models will catch up to whatever attempts to thwart it (especially if it becomes popular). As long as a person is recognizable to another person, a computer should also be able to recognize them. Trying to camouflage seems like a losing battle.
  - adrianN 2y ago
    Computers are a lot better at recognizing people than people. Simple things like your gait are enough.
- 1997cui 2y ago
  Just FYI, it is illegal to mask your face in New York https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna168590 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna168590
  - yaomtc 2y ago
    No, that's Nassau County, New York. Not the entirety of New York. Says it right there in the article you linked. There's also a lawsuit challenging it, also linked at the end of the article. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-lawsuit-challenges-public-face-covering-ban-nassau-county-new-rcna167936 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-lawsuit-challen...
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    So it is illegal to wear a hijab / niqab?
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      To be clear, a baseball hides more of your face than a hijab. (Niqab is a different story.)
    - j4_james 2y ago
      Answered in the article: > However, it has exemptions for health and religious reasons.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        I did not see that. I double checked just now and there are still zero results for "religious", not sure why.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I think it's safe to assume that 0.0000001% of the population will bother with that.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  Muslim women know. how is this controlling Gilde called in Dune again?
- chris-orgmenta 2y ago
  Does gait recognition (and body tics / unique movement style) not make this moot? My sense is that facial recognition is a stop-gap and soon to be superseded, because the tech is there for more holistic 'reads' of a person - And that those subtle things that we humans can't see are actually plain as day and as clear as a fingerprint. If we cover our face, then the data collected on gait etc. will be more than enough. If we adopt a different gait, then the data on other foibles and styles will then give us away. Etc. (we can't hope to disguise all of these at once)
  - cdirkx 2y ago
    A couple of years ago there were news articles that the pentagon has a "lasers that can identify people in a crowd from 200m away based on their heart rate signatures". No idea if that's true or overblown, but it doesnt seem unlikely that such technology becomes possible in the future.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      From where did they obtain your or my "heart signature"? What about gait, etc.?
      - fasa99 2y ago
        you can pull a heart rate from color amplification, same basic idea as motion amplification.
akira2501 2y ago
> these types of conversations seem like they're going to be more and more in the (sorry!) rearview mirror because we won't own the car nor the cameras that are recording the world as we "drive" around. Perhaps in the urban setting but the majority of this country is not contained within cities. Even then are you planning on banning motorcycles and RVs? > because they will consider it their right to drive themselves Until a law is passed otherwise they are absolutely correct. > the right-to-drive-oneself into the state constitution. I doubt it. The real fight is likely to be whether we continue using mixed vehicle and pedestrian infrastructure or if we force pedestrians off the roadway entirely. Then we'll have a "right to walk" constitutional crisis.
- PeterisP 2y ago
  > Perhaps in the urban setting but the majority of this country is not contained within cities. 83% of USA population live in urban areas, and that proportion is still steadily growing. The same trends apply everywhere else in the world as well.
  - sseagull 2y ago
    According to the 2020 US Census, about 80% live in an urban area. However, the definition is not exactly what people think of when you say “urban”. In 2020, the census lists 2,611 urban areas, including areas with a few thousand people. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/2020-ua-facts.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g... Shouldn’t be too hard to break this down with a more colloquial definition (say, areas over 500k or 750k people). I’m just not at a real computer :)
    - Tool_of_Society 2y ago
      Calumet park is a village right next to Chicago with under 7000 people. Northfield village has under 6000 people and it's located within about 15 miles of Chicago. It wasn't until I was about 18 that I realized what I thought was Chicago were actually small towns/villages. There's a whole slew of small villages next to or "in" larger cities.
rblatz 2y ago
I think this plays out where it becomes a luxury to drive oneself. Over the next 10-15 years it looks like self driving will continue to advance and will likely become safer than the alternative. Once that happens insurance companies will start charging more for people that drive themselves compared to people that let the car drive. I can see some states outlawing that practice. Then it’s left to see who is still underwriting insurance in those states.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Won't happen unless tradesmen, engineers, etc can use self-driving cars, which will e awkward when you need to park up onto a curb or something to inspect a downed power line.
  - rblatz 2y ago
    That is what .5% of all drivers that need to drive on a curb to inspect a power line? I’m not sure what your point even is here?
    - internet101010 2y ago
      Fourth of July, kids sports that take place outside, etc. are all regular occurrences where people need to be able to easily go up onto a curb and park in the grass.
      - rblatz 2y ago
        Seems like you’re grasping at straws to find weird edge cases that don’t at all preclude a mostly self driven future. I don’t think these cars will be made without steering wheels, or a mechanism to control the vehicle directly. But I bet they get a report of how often you manually drive and if you cross a specified threshold your rate increases. Edit: Also why would you need to park on grass! Hop out of the car and it will park itself wherever in a nearby lot, or just drives around until you need it.
kshmir 2y ago
[flagged]
- tomcam 2y ago
  I see you’re new here. Before you get officially rebuked read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and especially this section: In Comments Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Take all of the above literally. It makes the site special. And I hope you learn faster than I did!
hansvm 2y ago
> freedom crowd might fight it Look at the 2020 covid vaccines. The freedom crowd said this was going to have massive privacy implications, there was a propaganda machine pushing those people as being crazy antivaxers (maybe many were, let's talk about the large subset who just had privacy concerns), and the net result is that most US citizens have their names, addresses, preferred vaccination locations, preferred vaccination times, propensity for following local regulations, ..., recorded in a database so broken it's basically public. The freedom crowd didn't have a lot of power against a propaganda machine turning their neighbors against them. Tack in a few dozens of billions from Tesla or Google claiming their cars are safer than the average driver (in well-studied, dry, daylight, slow streets) and using that to push anyone unwilling to roll that tech out globally as a road-raged Luddite, and I'm not sure the freedom crowd are going to be able to do much to slow down our corporate overlords.
- harmmonica 2y ago
  I'm not going to respond to your Covid commentary in an effort to avoid going down a rabbit hole, but I should say that when I wrote "freedom crowd" it's not some monolith. Specifically, I think there are plenty of freedom-minded folks across the political spectrum, and I do believe that those folks, again, across the spectrum, are going to have a hard time accepting self-driving cars en masse because of the privacy implications. I do think it will weigh more to the conservative side of the fence, but if you haven't hung around with extremely progressive people there is a huge contingent on that side that is very wary of government mandates and, I feel dumb even writing something this obvious, far more wary of corporate America's agenda than any other population in the country. Maybe you were talking about the left in the first place, but I think you were referring to the right based on bringing up Covid and the other language you used.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hansvm 2y ago
    That isn't a political statement. The flow from "we won't shove you in a database" to "the non-existent database was leaked" is something that's independently verifiable. > left/right Yes, many people care about freedom > going to have a hard time accepting self-driving cars I'm usually optimistic, but I don't think public sentiment matters here. To the extent it does, it'll be some sort of Faustian bargain, where the law says your car must have a backup camera (arguably useful) and as a byproduct brings in unwanted, undisclosed tracking and also remote takeover capabilities through radio bugs (buffer overflows plus poorly designed canbus access). However self-driving inflicts itself on the masses, it'll be in a series of small enough steps that the freedom crowd can't appropriately fight back.
conradev 2y ago
Can’t I just buy a car that lets me drive it but also can drive itself? I can already today add functionality to cars with after-market hardware: https://comma.ai/ https://comma.ai/?
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  What is the legality of comma.ai kit? I find it hard to believe that states would want to allow it. It is surely much worse than Waymo.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are often in disrepair with poor signage, is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population.
- hiddencost 2y ago
  https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... > urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population
  - WrongAssumption 2y ago
    They are including suburbs in that number, so that doesn’t really counter the post you are responding to.
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      As I just replied, counting just the largest 100 cities covers more people than the rural population.
      - WrongAssumption 2y ago
        And as established, not the rural plus suburban population.
- grecy 2y ago
  > is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population. I disagree. I grew up in Rural Australia, lived in the Yukon and have driven to many of the world's most remote and undeveloped countries. You are saying "Self driving cars will NEVER work in <this specific case>" When what you mean to say is "Self driving cars will first work in the easy cases, and then years later will work in more and more cases until they eventually work everywhere." FWIW, people said exactly the same thing when the automobile came around and horses were the best transport. Of course automobiles didn't work well in places with no gas stations or very nasty horse tracks for many years. But the years will always roll on, and things will change.

threecheese 2y ago

I am hoping for an urban camouflage fashion revolution as a response to more pervasive monitoring: https://www.axios.com/2019/09/07/fooling-facial-recognition-fashion https://www.axios.com/2019/09/07/fooling-facial-recognition-... Public access to object recognition models may be important.

fasa99 2y ago
surely there are simpler ways of course if you've dealt with most hoodish ruffians, as the names tells us, the people of the hood love to wear hoodies - which generally work quite well to hide from cameras, especially those above, if the hood sags forward and over the face somewhat or these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses or outside or alongside hoodies, these can be seen as socially acceptable (mostly) ; https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/07/mask-of-your-own-face.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/07/mask-of-your-own-fa...
chefandy 2y ago
I'd like to see that too, but time and time again we've seen that: a) laypeople aren't usually moved by privacy violations more abstract than someone physically watching you do something. b) most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy. c) safety gear generally isn't considered sexy I think that this stuff would be perceived like wearing a physical bike helmet for your data privacy with all the cachet of Google Glass.
- lisper 2y ago
  > most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy. Ironic related story in the news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/08/29/passport-photos-makeup-security-tiktok/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/08/29/passport-ph...
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Also d) it's easier to update face recognition ML to see through the latest in camouflage fashion than to design, manufacture and sell new clothes after each update to the ML model. Especially that they need to keep fooling previous versions of the model too.
zeven7 2y ago
Surely object recognition models will catch up to whatever attempts to thwart it (especially if it becomes popular). As long as a person is recognizable to another person, a computer should also be able to recognize them. Trying to camouflage seems like a losing battle.
- adrianN 2y ago
  Computers are a lot better at recognizing people than people. Simple things like your gait are enough.
1997cui 2y ago
Just FYI, it is illegal to mask your face in New York https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna168590 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna168590
- yaomtc 2y ago
  No, that's Nassau County, New York. Not the entirety of New York. Says it right there in the article you linked. There's also a lawsuit challenging it, also linked at the end of the article. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-lawsuit-challenges-public-face-covering-ban-nassau-county-new-rcna167936 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-lawsuit-challen...
- johnisgood 2y ago
  So it is illegal to wear a hijab / niqab?
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    To be clear, a baseball hides more of your face than a hijab. (Niqab is a different story.)
  - j4_james 2y ago
    Answered in the article: > However, it has exemptions for health and religious reasons.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      I did not see that. I double checked just now and there are still zero results for "religious", not sure why.
kelnos 2y ago
I think it's safe to assume that 0.0000001% of the population will bother with that.
singularity2001 2y ago
Muslim women know. how is this controlling Gilde called in Dune again?
chris-orgmenta 2y ago
Does gait recognition (and body tics / unique movement style) not make this moot? My sense is that facial recognition is a stop-gap and soon to be superseded, because the tech is there for more holistic 'reads' of a person - And that those subtle things that we humans can't see are actually plain as day and as clear as a fingerprint. If we cover our face, then the data collected on gait etc. will be more than enough. If we adopt a different gait, then the data on other foibles and styles will then give us away. Etc. (we can't hope to disguise all of these at once)
- cdirkx 2y ago
  A couple of years ago there were news articles that the pentagon has a "lasers that can identify people in a crowd from 200m away based on their heart rate signatures". No idea if that's true or overblown, but it doesnt seem unlikely that such technology becomes possible in the future.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    From where did they obtain your or my "heart signature"? What about gait, etc.?
    - fasa99 2y ago
      you can pull a heart rate from color amplification, same basic idea as motion amplification.

akira2501 2y ago

> these types of conversations seem like they're going to be more and more in the (sorry!) rearview mirror because we won't own the car nor the cameras that are recording the world as we "drive" around. Perhaps in the urban setting but the majority of this country is not contained within cities. Even then are you planning on banning motorcycles and RVs? > because they will consider it their right to drive themselves Until a law is passed otherwise they are absolutely correct. > the right-to-drive-oneself into the state constitution. I doubt it. The real fight is likely to be whether we continue using mixed vehicle and pedestrian infrastructure or if we force pedestrians off the roadway entirely. Then we'll have a "right to walk" constitutional crisis.

PeterisP 2y ago
> Perhaps in the urban setting but the majority of this country is not contained within cities. 83% of USA population live in urban areas, and that proportion is still steadily growing. The same trends apply everywhere else in the world as well.
- sseagull 2y ago
  According to the 2020 US Census, about 80% live in an urban area. However, the definition is not exactly what people think of when you say “urban”. In 2020, the census lists 2,611 urban areas, including areas with a few thousand people. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/2020-ua-facts.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g... Shouldn’t be too hard to break this down with a more colloquial definition (say, areas over 500k or 750k people). I’m just not at a real computer :)
  - Tool_of_Society 2y ago
    Calumet park is a village right next to Chicago with under 7000 people. Northfield village has under 6000 people and it's located within about 15 miles of Chicago. It wasn't until I was about 18 that I realized what I thought was Chicago were actually small towns/villages. There's a whole slew of small villages next to or "in" larger cities.

rblatz 2y ago

I think this plays out where it becomes a luxury to drive oneself. Over the next 10-15 years it looks like self driving will continue to advance and will likely become safer than the alternative. Once that happens insurance companies will start charging more for people that drive themselves compared to people that let the car drive. I can see some states outlawing that practice. Then it’s left to see who is still underwriting insurance in those states.

bamboozled 2y ago
Won't happen unless tradesmen, engineers, etc can use self-driving cars, which will e awkward when you need to park up onto a curb or something to inspect a downed power line.
- rblatz 2y ago
  That is what .5% of all drivers that need to drive on a curb to inspect a power line? I’m not sure what your point even is here?
  - internet101010 2y ago
    Fourth of July, kids sports that take place outside, etc. are all regular occurrences where people need to be able to easily go up onto a curb and park in the grass.
    - rblatz 2y ago
      Seems like you’re grasping at straws to find weird edge cases that don’t at all preclude a mostly self driven future. I don’t think these cars will be made without steering wheels, or a mechanism to control the vehicle directly. But I bet they get a report of how often you manually drive and if you cross a specified threshold your rate increases. Edit: Also why would you need to park on grass! Hop out of the car and it will park itself wherever in a nearby lot, or just drives around until you need it.

kshmir 2y ago

[flagged]

tomcam 2y ago
I see you’re new here. Before you get officially rebuked read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and especially this section: In Comments Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Take all of the above literally. It makes the site special. And I hope you learn faster than I did!

hansvm 2y ago

> freedom crowd might fight it Look at the 2020 covid vaccines. The freedom crowd said this was going to have massive privacy implications, there was a propaganda machine pushing those people as being crazy antivaxers (maybe many were, let's talk about the large subset who just had privacy concerns), and the net result is that most US citizens have their names, addresses, preferred vaccination locations, preferred vaccination times, propensity for following local regulations, ..., recorded in a database so broken it's basically public. The freedom crowd didn't have a lot of power against a propaganda machine turning their neighbors against them. Tack in a few dozens of billions from Tesla or Google claiming their cars are safer than the average driver (in well-studied, dry, daylight, slow streets) and using that to push anyone unwilling to roll that tech out globally as a road-raged Luddite, and I'm not sure the freedom crowd are going to be able to do much to slow down our corporate overlords.

harmmonica 2y ago
I'm not going to respond to your Covid commentary in an effort to avoid going down a rabbit hole, but I should say that when I wrote "freedom crowd" it's not some monolith. Specifically, I think there are plenty of freedom-minded folks across the political spectrum, and I do believe that those folks, again, across the spectrum, are going to have a hard time accepting self-driving cars en masse because of the privacy implications. I do think it will weigh more to the conservative side of the fence, but if you haven't hung around with extremely progressive people there is a huge contingent on that side that is very wary of government mandates and, I feel dumb even writing something this obvious, far more wary of corporate America's agenda than any other population in the country. Maybe you were talking about the left in the first place, but I think you were referring to the right based on bringing up Covid and the other language you used.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hansvm 2y ago
  That isn't a political statement. The flow from "we won't shove you in a database" to "the non-existent database was leaked" is something that's independently verifiable. > left/right Yes, many people care about freedom > going to have a hard time accepting self-driving cars I'm usually optimistic, but I don't think public sentiment matters here. To the extent it does, it'll be some sort of Faustian bargain, where the law says your car must have a backup camera (arguably useful) and as a byproduct brings in unwanted, undisclosed tracking and also remote takeover capabilities through radio bugs (buffer overflows plus poorly designed canbus access). However self-driving inflicts itself on the masses, it'll be in a series of small enough steps that the freedom crowd can't appropriately fight back.

conradev 2y ago

Can’t I just buy a car that lets me drive it but also can drive itself? I can already today add functionality to cars with after-market hardware: https://comma.ai/ https://comma.ai/?

throwaway2037 2y ago
What is the legality of comma.ai kit? I find it hard to believe that states would want to allow it. It is surely much worse than Waymo.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are often in disrepair with poor signage, is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population.

hiddencost 2y ago
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... > urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population
- WrongAssumption 2y ago
  They are including suburbs in that number, so that doesn’t really counter the post you are responding to.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    As I just replied, counting just the largest 100 cities covers more people than the rural population.
    - WrongAssumption 2y ago
      And as established, not the rural plus suburban population.
grecy 2y ago
> is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population. I disagree. I grew up in Rural Australia, lived in the Yukon and have driven to many of the world's most remote and undeveloped countries. You are saying "Self driving cars will NEVER work in <this specific case>" When what you mean to say is "Self driving cars will first work in the easy cases, and then years later will work in more and more cases until they eventually work everywhere." FWIW, people said exactly the same thing when the automobile came around and horses were the best transport. Of course automobiles didn't work well in places with no gas stations or very nasty horse tracks for many years. But the years will always roll on, and things will change.