Hacker News Reader

Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

Why does this sort of critique keep coming up in HN threads on autonomous vehicles? have autonomous cars really gotten so good that "what if violent criminals try to attack it" is the only criticism left? I'm pretty sure not hitting cyclists is still a much larger problem than accidentally wandering into the plot of an action movie. less interesting, i guess.

theft is an insurance problem. If there's no human driver to get killed, it doesn't really matter if the truck gets robbed.

View on HN

On top of that, I doubt any human trucker is defending their load against two humans with shotguns, and that doesn't happen today enough to make the news. If anything else, you can make it so the vehicle isn't drivable by a human (no interface) and make the cargo door super secure.

> On top of that, I doubt any human trucker is defending their load against two humans with shotguns, and that doesn't happen today enough to make the news.

True, but if you aren't assaulting / endangering a driver, then the crime is lower-risk.

But if you are robbing an autonomous vehicle, you're probably going to be recorded doing it, and fleeing, which raises your risk because it leaves a pretty strong evidence trail. Yes, ski masks can be used to obscure your face, but car makes can be tracked if the getaway car has no plates.

If this becomes a frequent enough issue to matter economically, then perhaps we should start looking into what incentivizes stuff like that in the first place, and deal with it.

The thiefs use a laser to blind the cameras. Or a mirror to reflect the sun. Or spray paint. Or a smokescreen. Or other solutions. Easy.

> The thiefs use a laser to blind the cameras. Or a mirror to reflect the sun. Or spray paint. Or a smokescreen. Or other solutions. Easy.

None of these would work, except maybe "other solutions".

A getaway car isn’t needed, you just amble away and walk two miles the other direction.

If you just robbed a truck, are you going to carry all the contents on your back? For two miles?

A $100 foldable shopping wagon can carry $100k of iPhones trivially.

Up the hill! Both ways!

A self-driving vehicle will have far, far more sensing than any of today's trucks. Someone will know you're robbing them the moment you start, know where you are, be able to watch the entire event as it happens, and every ounce of it will be recorded.

And none of that will matter because they will just have a video of someone in a ski mask robbing a truck and walking away.

Robbing a truck of what? Trucks are full of heavy stuff that's not particularly valuable. Were it otherwise it wouldn't get shipped in an unguarded truck.

iPhones are not shipped in a guarded truck.

Walk away with 20 tons of stolen goods? How are you going to accomplish that? Why not do something interesting like reprogram a whole fleet of cargo trucks to deliver the cargo to the wrong destination?

People would steal from trucks significantly more frequently if there was no risk of harm like there is with the shotgun scenario.

I had two bikes stolen that had locks at them (at different times) from my apartment in Mountain View. Theft is rampant and removing the threat of a real driver pushing back completely changes the calculus for trucks.

It, to me, fits in with a wider implicit value on HN that property is worth more than people.

If I'm a truck driver who someone tries to rob ..sure just take it. Bit my stuff, that's why I have insurance. Who cares if a truck gets robbed if it protects a human life?

You're correct, autonomous vehicles are absolutely not to the point where highway robbery is a prime concern. But even if they were, the spoofing issue isn't just another tough problem to solve. It's a potential arms race.

Faking out machine learning systems is rapidly progressing from a few "fun proof-of-concept" examples to a serious area of study, and we've already seen it (gently) applied to autonomous vehicles [1] (ignore the overblown headline, it's just a piece of tape on a sign).

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615244/hackers-can-trick-...

> It's a potential arms race

but it's currently solved by one guy sitting in a truck, so it's not really a potential arms race that can escalate too far before you fall back to the one guy sitting in a truck.

worst case scenario, you replace a driver with an actual security guard who is trained as a security guard and can focus on security instead of driving.

worst case scenario, you replace a driver with an actual security guard

Or even just do that for a certain percentage of trips. (See "Margin of Profit" by Poul Anderson).

A human solution does seem like the real solution to the current shortcomings of automated driving but security guard seems like too narrow of a role. If you could have a shepard whose job was to sit in a lead vehicle that identifies, tags, and issues orders for avoiding obstacles in real-time for the automated herd trucks then the problem is 99% finished as far as creating a new business model goes. City streets are terrible so leave that problem to the futurists, one guy herding flocks of five or ten trucks to depots outside the city would already represent massive savings.

This is how automation actually progresses. It's not bam, one day, truckers are replaced with AI that's equally competant at driving. Rather, day by day, the amount of freight moved, per unit cost/human effort, slowly decreases.

Much of this efficiency has already occured in terms of routing optimization.

In a self driving world of well behaved traffic, police and highway patrol are going to need some way to maintain their jobs.

One large difference is that a lot of people hold back from theft purely because there's a human involved. Doing illegal things to human beings is a whole higher tier of scary, compared to doing those same illegal things to robots.

Consider the difference between robbery and shoplifting. One is the domain of rare sociopaths; the other is common-enough to be almost a subculture among teenagers in certain areas.

Robbing a robot is, in some sense, just shoplifting (or, more accurately, warehouse theft) performed against a moving target. It's not "the plot of an action movie"; it's some unethical people's lazy Sunday afternoon. I'd expect it to be far more commonplace, once it is possible at all.

And, as well, keep in mind that, the more predictable something is, the more you can automate attacks on it. It's a lot easier to have a worm going around stealing Bitcoin out of people's digital wallets on their PCs, than it is to steal real wallets. Likewise, it's a lot easier to create some kind of drone that steals from other robots, than it is to create a drone that steals from human-driven vehicles. In combination with the property of people feeling much less compunction against attacking robots in the first place, I'd bet that you'll see e.g. delivery drones having their cargos hijacked by pirate drones, with increasing frequency. Autonomous trucks are just a larger-scale variant of the same.

Pirate drones? Really? In the real world autonomous systems get hacked and bevome the "pirate" drones themselves. It's quite boring, I know.

Is a warehouse on wheels absolutely festooned with cameras less secure than a warehouse in the middle of nowhere?

Yes, people don’t leave warehouses without guards if there is anything of great value in them that’s easily to walk away with.

If you're not trusting stuff to sit static without a human near by you probably wouldn't let it hurtle down the road with the same.

If we’re assuming these vehicles are FULLY autonomous, a simple fix for this is to add a manual override that allows the driver to drive for themselves. Then the heist is basically as effective as it’d be today. (To be honest, I’d be surprised if such a feature isn’t required by law).

Though off-topic, the conversation of vehicle-feature-defect-related heists reminds me of Jaime Zapata, a US agent killed in Mexico after his SUV doors automatically unlocked when parked. (Though it’s unclear if locks would have made any difference in the outcome).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Zapata

have autonomous cars really gotten so good that "what if violent criminals try to attack it" is the only criticism left?

No, they haven't. This is (by far) not the only criticism, but it's a valid concern which has literally zero attention to addressing it.

I'm pretty sure not hitting cyclists is still a much larger problem...

Probably, and that one still isn't fixed either.

What makes you think no one is considering how to address spoofing? It seems likely to me that many of these companies have considered these cases in far more depth than you or I have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com