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Comment by greggman2 | Hacker News Reader

It's going to be interesting how it will work with self driving cars. Arguably the police will push for some kind of police only "pull over and stop" feature they can aim at any car which I'm sure will get absued. If you're in a self driving taxi you'd arguably not be the one abliged to pull over, rather the taxi's virutal driver is the one that needs to pull over. In fact with perfect self driving the passenger might not even be remotely aware of being asked to pull over. They could be asleeep, watching video with headphones on, playing VR games, anything to pass the time.

Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle. They have a much longer range than drones. It seems only a matter of time before someone decides to use one in that way or other scary ways.

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> Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle[sic].

I wouldn't worry about the spread of level 4/5-automation changing the calculus here on a small actor basis. VBIED's are already a serious threat, and require no significant technical innovation, but outside of conflict zones we don't see a ton of them.

Assuming we don't require physical failsafes though and truly airgap driving systems from any network connectivity (which we won't, I guarantee it) there's definitely a worry on the state level actor front.

I can totally imagine the first salvo in WW3 being the utility grid, cell networks, and crashing all the rooted cars, but that horse has likely already left the stable.

>Assuming we don't require physical failsafes though and truly airgap driving systems from any network connectivity (which we won't, I guarantee it) there's definitely a worry on the state level actor front.

I think it's quite plausible that any autonomous vehicle will have something akin to a big red STOP button, just like most other automated machinery.

How would you expect a car to handle such a stop command issued while traveling on a busy road at highway speed?

This could easily be done without any automation, only using a FPV system similar to a drone. It's simple enough to do this with only a Comma.ai devkit and some FPV hardware.

Yes, I think it is a given that when actual self-driving cars become a reality they will have to include a system allowing police and emergency services to control them. It will no doubt be a criminal offence to temper with that system.

This is a reasonable adaptation to self-driving cars, though.

I really really don't like that, and I really hope it'll never happen here. The possibilities for abuse are amazing. (Congrats on 1k karma)

Hey, thanks.

I think this is an unavoidable and perhaps unintended consequence of having self-driving cars because the alternative will be deemed unacceptable.

I'm also willing to bet on a system to locate any self-driving car at any time, which the police and emergency services will have access to.

In Europe, absolutely.

In the US, there's no way that could pass.

Well, owners will demand it because no-one will want their car to drive off and disappear and they don't know where it is. The question really is then how long before police forces lobby for access... Though indeed this may end up conditional on getting a warrant depending on the jurisdiction.

You can already buy a GPS tracker for your own car if you're worried about where it ends up. My guess that adoption of that technology is in the single digits. Not really seeing the demand for this.

Cars do not drive themselves yet... I'm really discussing that: full self-driving cars that can drive around with no-one inside.

When that becomes a reality I'm sure everyone will want a tracker.

The short story 'Car Wars' explores some of the implications here. https://this.deakin.edu.au/self-improvement/car-wars

> Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle.

To what, hit a person?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack

86 people were killed, 458 hurt.

Don't see how these two things are related.

Perhaps you have ignored all the EU terror attacks that used vehicles on pedestrian streets.

Why do they even need to pull it over, their might be no one in the car.

And talk about being abused, cars are already being abused. They kill 40,000 people every single year, and injure or disable 2.5million in the USA alone. Somehow this is acceptable to people.

> Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle

No different to now.

I don't agree it's no different to now. The difference is, availablilty, anonymity, and action at a distance. A bad guy can send a car a couple hundred miles away full of explosives or they can remotely drive it. When it's ubiqitous things maybe change. People were arguably not as jerky before the net. The ability it sit at a screen and type anonymous invective unleashed or amplified supressed behavior. Self driving cars (and drones) might do the same, make it so easy to do certain types of bad things that more people will do them than happens today.

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