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Comment by ckmiller | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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> 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.

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.

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).

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

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