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Comment by bryondowd | Hacker News Reader

This sort of makes me wonder about how driverless cars could be designed to handle this sort of situation. Or any situation where an authorized human is temporarily modifying traffic rules using gestures and verbal communication. Especially in edge cases where they might be giving non-trivial instructions to individual cars.

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Well, driverless cars will have to deal with unauthorized humans doing all sorts of weird stuff in traffic.

I think this is a smaller problem.

These will be authorised humans, and thus will probably have some kind of (hopefully cryptographicly protected) id to tell the cars that this is an instruction it probably wants to obey.

So they will take OTA instructions through a backdoor?

More like a front door; one of the biggest problems with backdoors is that they are not supposed to allow the 'owner' to know what is going on.

Humans and non-humans.

Actually, I would think that handling unauthorized humans would be the smaller problem, similar to animals and other obstacles. Stop or maneuver as needed to avoid a collision, then you can try dealing with it, but always have the short term option of just staying put while things sort themselves out. In the case of a human authorized to give orders, you can't just sit still when the situation isn't understood, because you may be being ordered to move out of the way.

Would one simply stop if one were to encounter a intersection that has flesh-and-bones policeman directing traffic (like 'hey there's a meatbag on the road better stop')?

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