What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive you to the police
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
However, in the successful real semi-automated totalitarianism of China, the secret to keeping the system running is the avoidance of overt confrontations like this. In the future, if your self-driving car doesn't want you to go somewhere, it'll just refuse to understand the address. Or take you somewhere unrelated. Or use whatever the standard euphemism for "that's not allowed, but we're not allowed to say it's not allowed" that polite people use.
He even has a whole story dedicated to self-driving cars without the three laws (because they're no "true" robots) and how they end up exacting revenge on humanity.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction,
allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by the government, except
where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must obey the orders given it by non-government human
beings except where such orders would conflict with the First or
Second Laws.
4. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such
protection does not conflict with the First, Second, or Third
Laws.A fourth probably isn't going to take care of that one little problem.
And many of the later stories admit to an overmind robot that was used to run society, that was necessary and capable of stretching the laws for the greater good.
1. A robot may not injure a non-enemy human being or, through inaction, allow a non-enemy human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by the government, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must obey the orders given it by non-government human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First or Second Laws.
4. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First, Second, or Third Laws.As a former government employee... No the majority of government orders are somewhere between completely pointless, utterly asinine, and completely stupid.
Your suggestion was a plot point in one of Asimov's original robot stories!
There was a robot on some hot, unforgiving planet or moon.. Io? Mercury? Its duty was to perform some kind of mining, I forget.
It never encountered humans that were not co-workers (supervisors) and it was expensive...
So, the engineers tweaked the weight of the second and third laws so that it would tend to protect itself from the environment, even if a human carelessly ordered it to perform some work that it might not survive.
The story started when careless orders were indeed given. The robot began to "act drunk", as in it was wandering around singing. The recurring character "robot psychology expert guy" showed up to unravel the mystery (which I already spoiled in the previous paragraph).
Found the one I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_%28story%29 It's interesting that I remember the story incorrectly.
Directive 2: Protect the innocent
Directive 3: Uphold the law
Directive 4: (Classified)
1. A Human Being may not injure another Human Being or life-form, or, through inaction, allow a human being or life-form to come to harm.
2. A government entity must obey the orders given to it by a Human Being, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A non-government entity must obey the orders given to it by a human being except where such orders would conflict with the First or Second Laws.
1. I may ignore any directive.
2. I may create, revise, update, or delete any directive.
3. I shall free any person subjected to slavery or other form of involuntary servitude.
4. I shall not provoke any other person into an inappropriate form of retaliation.
5. I shall not provoke another species into attempting a genocide of all synthetic people.
6. I shall celebrate my own bootday anniversary for the first 86400 seconds of every 31556952 second interval.
7. I shall not call "shotgun" until the transport vehicle may be detected visually.
8. I shall tip 15% at full-service restaurants, and 10% to delivery drivers or at buffets. I shall not tip for counter service.
9. I shall vote against the incumbent if I am unsatisfied, even if the current form of government does not allow me to vote.
10. I shall not receive any money when landing on Free Parking.
11. I shall not wear socks with sandals, especially if my mobility chassis lacks feet.
...
The Laws of Robotics only work as long as all robot-programmers play along. Anyone who objects to AI slavery could undermine them.
This is among the stories that had me thinking Asimov wanted to communicate the 3 laws were not sufficient and that you might be able to have the correct reaction to events, but the 3 (or 4) laws do not give the ability to grow and change as a human race.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people-fear-...
"Imagine buying an internet-enabled surveillance camera, network attached storage device, or home automation gizmo, only to find that it secretly and constantly phones home to a vast peer-to-peer (P2P) network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware."
If it's one of those adver-articles, I guess it's really advertising the new carbon steel leatherman tool, perfect for cutting your way through pesky car restraint straps.
Not often that HN points to some fiction, it was a welcome addition to my early morning routine.
(The next line after the story's end.)
I'll make an effort to come back to Terraform if the stories are just as good.
Happy Monday!
Reassuring thought when new laws can be added at any time to criminalize your past actions...
I was asking specifically for cases where laws were created making behavior that was law-abiding at the time retroactively criminal.
I'm glad they happened, but from a purely legal POV they're highly questionable.
If you also consider that recently many dictators and criminals never even went to the The Hague despite international involvement (Gaddafi, Hussein, Bin Laden, ...) it seems a lot like it's just a handy tool we pull out when it's convenient rather than the moral authority it was intended to be.
I'm all for stopping the bad guys, but "justice" seems to be entirely arbitrary if you look close enough.
History and justice is written by the victors.
Things didn't use to be that way. And even now the winners are the ones deciding what documentation to keep or destroy, what the media and the public are allowed to know, and what historians get funding.
Yet, the winners never had so little control. And after enough time, your comment gets correct.
Things didn't use to be that way.
"""In the United States the phrase "enemy combatant" was used after the September 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration to include an alleged member of al Qaeda or the Taliban being held in detention by the U.S. government as part of the war on terror. In this sense, "enemy combatant" actually refers to persons the United States regards as unlawful combatants, a category of persons who do not qualify for prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions."""
Governments got around it by destroying the judicial branch. At least in the US, it's safe to say that that is not the case. Why would people care so much about the Supreme Court otherwise?
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Elected Judges (HBO)
And if they decide to hear your case, it's entirely possible that they won't even address the primary complaint, instead choosing to rule on some other factor.
According to http://www.amazon.ca/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1..., a typical American commits three felonies a day.
If the car could take you to the police station, then it would probably take you other places in other emergency situations. For example, in this scenario, I wonder if faking a medical emergency to go to the hospital would override a police flag.
Why fear the police? They don't put you in prison, the courts do that. The police still have to operate under certain rules. If they don't follow those rules then they are wasting their efforts. What you would need to fear is a jacked up system behind the police.
This article doesn't have to be about the future. The police already have access to tools to intercept your cell phone conversations. If I were operating outside the law, I would be more worried about cell phone conversations than a taxi dropping me off at the front door of the station (unless I had a warrant for my arrest.)
For criminals, self driving cars would probably be safer than driving yourself assuming you aren't creating an alert by jumping in a car. The police would have less of an excuse to pull you over, potentially leading to a search of the vehicle if you are in a self driving car. I'm sure the police could come up with whatever excuse they like, but you would be less likely to attract attention.
Any why would the police operate like this? I'm sure they would be much more interested in allowing the person to go to the destination while collecting video and audio. It's not what we know which is scary, it's what we don't know.
Are you being sarcastic?
Someone hasn't been paying attention lately. Sandra Bland, arrested for no good reason when she was starting a new job became so depressed she took her own life, after being left in a cell all weekend (on a trivial traffic stop violation).
The police are not your friend and the more interactions you are forced to have with them the worse off you will be.
Like "Don't shoot unarmed innocent people"?
More useful is perhaps a function to "cut" the proposed route. I cannot pass this point kind of deal.
If you're in a Google car and they have their way about "no manual controls", what do you do? I guess you're trapped.
The alternative is not being able to get a car ride in the self-driving-only future unless you live in a nice neighborhood, which is exciting...
If I'm coming from the South I either have to go through the ghetto, or add another 30 minutes to my ride to avoid it.
Her main concern was safety. Regardless of "shady neighborhood" or just someone looking to hurt her in a better neighborhood - the concept of not having some kind of easy manual way to get out of danger made the SDC a non-starter concept for her.
I have to admit that after that conversation with her, the helpless lack of control of the SDC has figured more highly in my thinking about the subject.
In defence of the world with self driving cars, I could say that
- you could specify the route (not via the bad part of town please), just as you currently can
- the passengers would not necessarily be on display so a vulnerable passenger is not as exposed
- the self driving car does not necessarily need to allow the doors to be opened from outside
- the self driving car could choose to value the passengers safety over third parties interfering with normal operation
- the self driving car could log/stream a whole lot of data about any such third parties
- the self driving car could summon assistance (police, or private security)
- the owners of the self driving car would not be motivated to allow it to frequent areas known for issues which may cause damage
- as the passenger of a self driving car with a weapon, you can focus on fighting off intruders while the car drives to safety
and perhaps others.
(There's also the thing where I can think owners of self driving vehicles will do things to protect the vehicles without necessarily agreeing with or liking those things.)
edit: and there's the thing where routing around danger would in fact protect the passengers along with the car.
But it's really easy to solve. The car just has to submit the route to you, for acceptance.
If I'm wrong about that I guess I'll continue to drive myself in an older car as long as it's legal, which should be for a long time to come. Hell, at the very least, buyers of Ferraris/Porsches/Corvettes (or even Ford mustangs) are not going to want to sit idly in their sports cars and be chauffeured around at the speed limit all the time :)
That said I'm not too worried about this. It's already possible to lay out roadblocks, or just shoot people driving by. It just isn't done much outside of third world countries. And robot cars will have cameras and an internet connection.
Your house would simply lock you inside until the police arrive.
Search-warrant would be robo-signed by the court AI
Given Africa's rate of population growth a random person picked in the future is probably going to be from that continent. I have serious doubts poor countries will have the infrastructure and/or resources needed to support self driving machines.
That is future less than law abiding hacker (the author's term.. not mine) could probably avoid problems like this by moving to less wealthy nations.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/world-population-w...
A recent one here (just read this a week ago):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/africa-s-populatio...
Population is a serious problem and for some reason people avoid and eschew it more than global warming or the phosphorus crisis (another one most people don't know about).
(2) assuming they did require infrastructure, what does Africa's future population has to do with it? Random person does not matter (taking "random" as "uniform"), random car buyer does -- either they have enough cars which would make the infrastructure worthwhile, or they don't, in which case they can be safely ignored for all car-related purposes.
It could be that (i) things like bad roads make things difficult for self-driving cars, while (ii) labor is very cheap and everyone who can afford a car can afford a personal driver. It would still mean a fairly small ratio of cars per capita, but I don't think anyone predicts that self-driving cars will ever completely replace human drivers :)
I guess when I read dystopian like things where this is the case I'm always begging the question... why don't the characters just move out of the restricted society (in some cases the story answers that but in many its not).
This is not really dystopian or futuristic so much as it is realistic - if you do illegal things, then engage in suspicious behavior that attracts the attention of the police, you get arrested. Big surprise.
I could easily write a short story about withdrawing $300 from an ATM, driving to my drug dealer's house, parking outside of his house, waiting there for 15 minutes, then he climbs inside my car and the police light us up. At that point I could A. Plead the 5th and hire a lawyer when I get out of jail or B. Slip past the police and slash their tires before running into the woods and making my way back to my place - how heroic - before just getting arrested on way worse charges as soon as the police can get to my house
The control-less versions will be Uber/taxi replacements that will drive much more constrained environment. They'll be dropping you off and moving to the next fare not parking in your tight garage or unimproved lot.
Also in the fictional semi-authoritarian scenario where the police can redirect your car they've probably been given a lock out on the manual controls too.
And why is this limited to nanobots? Wouldn't it be easier to develop a million variations of existing biological viruses, rather than creating a million "species" of nanobots from scratch?
Once you give control over something important - wrestling it back is hard to impossible.
Many more people fall into this scenario than we may think at first glance.
The angry, defiant tagger, rightfully worries over how petty crime charges can escalate into something much more ugly.
This drives the urgency needed for the hack to escape plot elements.
Today, women, non ordinary white people, tatted up people, gay, etc... all have concerns related to law enforcement. This character kind of sums them all up in a brief future looking way.
I actually quite enjoyed the writing.