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Comment by zepearl | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward at the handling of the "corner cases" related to society.

E.g. somebody that wants to rob you could just stand in front of your car (or put some small obstacle) knowing that the car will stop (to avoid damaging itself and/or whatever is in front of it).

Even in the case of simpler tech which is generally available already today some unexpected problems might arise once people become really aware that it exists on 99% of the vehicles.

For example, in the case of an at least partially selfish person, why should s/he wait to cross the street if s/he knows that the car that is nearing has an anti-collision/auto-break system? I admit that I might even start doing that myself whenever I'm late for something, have to catch the bus, etc... :)

Might end up being a funny experience sitting in a car that has to do emergency breaking every other minute... :)

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> why should s/he wait to cross the street if s/he knows that the car that is nearing has an anti-collision/auto-break system

I would highly recommend visiting Cairo in Egypt and crossing a busy road: With a swarm of cars going left and right, you simply 'pick a car' by looking directly at it and step out into the stream of (multi-lane) traffic. It's freaky at first, but it slows, moves and bends around you as you walk across the road. I've seen mothers with bags and children doing this at even busier places.

It seems that here in the west, when we're driving, we have a 'get out of my way' mentality that seems out of proportion with how we walk down a pavement. ie, As we walk, we move and flow around slower/oncoming people -- we certainly don't shout at fellow pedestrians to get out of the way and then barge them out of the way when they don't.

Edit: A video of cairo street crossing https://youtu.be/qYjiO_kLYKY

So, once everybody owns a self-driving car or at least one with auto-breaking, nobody would have to use the egyptian "pick a car"-method as people would just cross the street knowing that the cars would just break/stop on their own.

Traffic might come to a stop in a big city (as they are today)? Or will "good habit" prevail? Or, will it be a grey zone?

Pedestrians already have this theoretical right. In Montreal, it's heavily used. And it's fine - if you wanted to get somewhere quickly, after all, you would walk!

That video makes me suspect that it goes wrong quite often too.

Funny, in Hanoi I noticed a similar tactic -- make it absolutely clear that you can't see the oncoming car. Look at the ground. Walk steadily. This is "precommitment" to not flinching in the game of "chicken" (in a game-theoretic sense.)

I like to joke that it's why people wear those big conical hats in Vietnam -- you can't see the cars, so it's their job to avoid you :-).

Note: Egypt has roughly 10x the road fatality rate per 100k vehicles vs. the US, or ~20x the rate of Germany or the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Egypt also has one of the highest number of traffic-related deaths in the world. I don’t quite understand why your interpretation of it turns into a criticism of the “west”. The Egyptian system you describe is a dangerous mess, and significantly inferior to western traffic laws.

But many more people get hurt or die in Cairo and Egypt over cars. This seems like the worst possible example.

Maybe that would be a good way of making cities more human friendly instead of car friendly - if you want to cross the road, just go for it and the cars will stop or avoid you. Probably not a good idea on highways and fast roads obviously.

Interesting point of view - this might be the real end result of the implementation of such automation. Still, some details will be tricky to solve... .

Most passengers won't want concussions and/or bit tongues from frequent high-speed stops due to impatient pedestrians.

Probably why they added the caveat for high speed roads.

That's a great direction to think in. Eventually the car will become a relic of the past, like the horse drawn carriage.

It will become a pure sport, like riding horses :)

Relevant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf

> somebody that wants to rob you could just stand in front of the car

As opposed to placing some rocks on the street like they do now?

> why should s/he wait to cross the street if s/he knows that the car that is nearing has an anti-collision/auto-break system?

Why do them wait now? Current cars stop too.

Well, it's probably all about details.

If I see rocks I can e.g. drive around them, judge if they're really too big for my car, drive on the sidewalk, etc.. => all these options are really complicated to program.

Current cars don't stop, at least not in Europe - they might break/go slower but it's going to be mixed with steering to avoid whoever is there causing all that fuzz. And if I think that whoever is in front of me is a threat that I might just run over him/her (or "it" for "animal" - a different kind of complexity - e.g. do you stop for 1 frog? 10 frogs? 100 frogs?) , at least partially.

I saw someone criticize self-driving cars by saying that if someone just covered a stop sign, the car wouldn't know to stop. This is different than the status quo how?

The status quo is "a large number of drivers will recognize that the intersection should probably have one and at least exercise some caution".

It should be able to program a self-driving car with a) a database of known intersections and their conditions as a fallback and b) to evaluate the conditions of an upcoming intersection for safety even without the requisite signage.

I'd suspect they do that already - based on what I've read they're not relying entirely on signage and the lidar is looking for potential hazards. I'd suspect it act similarly to a human in that situation.

Maybe it'd run it if there's no one else around, but a human probably would too in that case.

I would think a self driving car would have access to Waze in almost real time.

Maybe a large number of drivers would know, but that’s pure guessing. Could be a larger number of drivers wouldn’t know.

A while back, one of the four-way stops in our area got turned into a two-way stop. It took months for folks to stop treating it as a four-way, despite "new traffic pattern" signs.

Another imperfect analogy is power outages and stop lights. For the most part, it doesn't result in full-speed collisions; instead, folks treat it as a stop sign.

Self-driving cars are going to need a "huh, that doesn't look right..." system. Detecting missing/defaced/misleading signs should be a part of it.

> instead, folks treat it as a stop sign.

That's what you're supposed to do. In some cases, the traffic lights fail to a mode where one direction is blinking red, which is treated like a stop sign, and the other is blinking yellow, which is treated sort of like a yield sign (i.e., proceed, but with caution).

I believe the law (and common sense) states that if the traffic light it out, you treat it like a 4-way stop sign intersection.

Besides chances are self-driving cars are going to have drm that makes it impossible to steal.

When has DRM ever worked as more than a temporary measure? Also if car DRM is like games and software DRM, it will punish the honest user while not even remotely harming the thief!

"You wouldn't steal a car..."

ESR rethoric aside iPhones Activation Lock works pretty well and phones are hardly as regulated as cars. If you jailbreak your cars onboard computer it’s no longer road legal.

> why should s/he wait to cross the street if s/he knows that the car that is nearing has an anti-collision/auto-break system?

In the least dystopian-surveillance-state future scenarios, there will be a giant array of cameras and sensors pointed at anyone who crosses this way. How hard would it be to identify this person and ramp up enforcement as necessary? You'll never completely stop it, but I imagine it could be lowered to acceptable levels.

>For example, in the case of an at least partially selfish person, why should s/he wait to cross the street if s/he knows that the car that is nearing has an anti-collision/auto-break system?

If they get advanced enough, they may pull a Terminator 2: slow down enough to hurt you, but not kill. This fulfills their directive not to kill while disincentivizing jaywalking.

The reverse Russian pedestrian problem, nice.

Or using salt https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywwba5/meet-the-artist-us...

why wouldn't standing in front of a car to rob the driver work now? surely most people aren't going to run you over

In Pune, a metro city of India, we used to cross 5 lanes of a highway each side by crossing one lane at a time. You look at lane traffic, get a spot, cross that lane, then repeat 9 times.

E.g. somebody that wants to rob you could just stand in front of your car (or put some small obstacle) knowing that the car will stop (to avoid damaging itself and/or whatever is in front of it).

They'd also have to disable any manual override controls.

This is in the context of the US moving towards cars not having steering wheels. What manual override?

Why couldn't you just have one on the screen?

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