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Comment by alicorn | Hacker News Reader

"Fernandes explains that self-driving cars use multiple sensors and algorithms and don't make decisions on any single machine-learning model." For now, maybe, but, from what I have heard, there is push from the car manufacturers to consolidate on one type of sensor feed as much as possible, to minimize costs. Which implies just that - that the wanted state is one type of sensor, as cheap as possible + one model that is expected to tell the absolute truth. Which is stupid of course, but I assume that the cost-cutting guys are not aware / willfully ignorant of the pitfalls. On another note, the article conflates machine learning / neural networks with AI, I expected better of Wired...

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DL is a subset of ML is a subset of AI. No fallacy or conflation.

I see your point. From my perspective however it is akin to insisting that foot == human.

It's clearly akin to human is mammal.

One is a category, another is a sub-category.

"Which is stupid of course, but I assume that the cost-cutting guys are not aware / willfully ignorant of the pitfalls"

Or maybe they know something you don't?

A sensor(s) that is too expensive to deploy saves no one. A cheap sensor(s)/model that is not as reliable as an expensive one, but is cheap enough to deploy might save a lot of people, even if it occasionally kills a few.

A 100,000$ sensor will save 10 person / year and kill 1 person (hint, only the wealthy will have this one). A 10,000 sensor will save 100 people / year and kill 100 people (hint, only the 3% will have this one). A 1,000 dollar will save 25,000 / year and kill 10000 people (hint, everyone will have this one).

The cheap sensor wins in aggregate even if it's not perfect.

And a sensor/AI package that is cheap enough to deploy to everyone can kill everyone in a car if it is hacked properly, and monoculture means everyone gets hit.

You are not considering the black swan events, though, honestly, "someone with malignant intent hacks the entire car network" isn't even a black swan, it's perfectly predictable. What major hacking power involved in a war with some other country full of self-driving cars would pass up the ability to hack all the self-driving cars to crash themselves, with something as simple as "stop self-navigating and set throttle to 100%"? The resulting carnage would certainly serve as a solid distraction to the military.

Personally, I'm increasingly coming around to the position that self-driving cars ought to just be banned, or at least, held to exceedingly high security criteria, among which I'd probably start with "the self-driving car is not permitted to be hooked to any network, ever, and all radio communication must be provably unable to result in code execution at the electronic level, before it even gets into the computer layer". If nobody is going to give a shit about security and these things are all going to be hooked up to a network full time, the perfectly obvious resulting disaster outweighs all the potential benefits by multiple orders of magnitude.

There's this "intent" bias when people consider threats. Hacking a military drone seems a huge threat. Hacking a car seems a minor threat because cars aren't intended to kill people.

Yet terrorist attacks with trucks driving into a crowd are very deadly, with one truck there are often dozens of dead. Cars are as effective at killing as weapons. Arguably more effective, because they can kill lots of people at once, and can move around without causing panic till the last moment.

We're just used to them.

>And a sensor/AI package that is cheap enough to deploy to everyone can kill everyone in a car if it is hacked properly, and monoculture means everyone gets hit.

You obviously didn't watch Maximum Overdrive. The Russians have a satellite mounted laser that can save us from such a scenario.

I mean... if were going to talk about fantasy lets go all in.

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