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Comment by aero142 | Hacker News Reader

If the point is that autonomous cars are succeptable to deliberate malicious actors, I've got bad news about the rest of the world. Human drivers are incredibly succeptable to me throwing a $2 brick throught the front windshield as well. It sounds like the issue is already resolved in this case.

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I guess the difference here is the scope of how many you can impact.

In order to get all Teslas who go past a sign on the highway, you just have to modify the sign slightly and everyone is affected (in theory).

In order to affect the same amount of people with your "brick through the windshield" strategy, you'll need a lot more manpower than just a sticker on a sign.

do you really need the manpower though? it shouldn't be that hard to build a mechanical device that can do the brick throwing?

you cant seriously be arguing its as easy or invisible to set up a brick throwing machine as it is to put a piece of tape on a speed limit sign?

That depends on the size of wreck you manage to cause, don't you think? In any case, it takes no more people to drop a brick than it does to sticker a sign.

To be clear, I find this entire concept of unsupervised robot vehicles both dangerous and absurd - even more so than the already dangerous and absurd baseline of a society so intimately bound up with automotive travel as ours. Exceeding such a high baseline as that is in its way impressive, and certainly demonstrates the astonishing overconfidence rampant in some segments of our very young and rather careless industry, but let's not get distracted from that essential point and waste our efforts on inconsequential arguments over whether a sticker is more dangerous than a brick.

> That depends on the size of wreck you manage to cause, don't you think?

No, I think it's the scope of affecting many after another without doing something more. Throwing bricks requires continues action while a sticker is a thing you do once and then it "does it for you".

See it as working every day and getting paid for that, versus a savings account where you get returns without really doing anything.

And sorry, I didn't really join the conversations to argue against "concept of unsupervised robot vehicles [is] both dangerous and absurd " so I agree with the rest of your message.

What if this wasn't malicious. What if someone had taped something over the sign earlier, like for construction, and removed all but a tiny bit of tape later?

What if it was mud? Or salt? Or bird shit?

Different state's Department of Transportation seem to do this themselves! When adjusting lanes on highways, they will paint over the old stripes with "black" paint. During good lighting conditions it is clear what you are supposed to do. But as soon as conditions are worse, like heavy rain in low light, all I can see are crisscrossing lane markers!

So a malicious actor could put black "tape" down on a highway, and just wait for the right conditions for people to get confused.

I don't have to stick around to put some tape on a sign, or change an electronic speed sign. A brick requires some presence.

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