Self-Driving Cars Will Stop for Police, Roll Windows Down, Unlock Doors | Hacker News Reader

Self-Driving Cars Will Stop for Police, Roll Windows Down, Unlock Doors

technocracy.news

34 pointsaww_dang25 comments

I drive a semi truck, and I already have one foot in that world.

Yesterday my manager texted me that I had not come to a full stop earlier in the day. I texted back that I'll do better, so that she could check off that that communication happened.

These trucks are instrumented and telemetered to a proctological level.

If I have a hard braking event I get an automated message about it, on the comm terminal, within minutes. Soon after that I get a terminal message from a human.

If it's raining in my area (according to the NWS) I get a message if I creep above 57mph (my company's policy is 55mph in rain).

It saved me once. I opened a trailer at a destination and freight was damaged. I was only pulling that trailer the last miles. Called the appropriate department, she looked at my driving history for the day, and saw no panic braking or rolling. So it didn't go against me.

If you’re not familiar with the LockPickingLawyer on YouTube, you should look him up. Specifically, the videos where he shows how quickly and easily someone with no skill and easily obtained items can open a standard police car shotgun lock.

Now consider: if that’s the bar for securing a police firearm, how well will this kind of tech be safeguarded?

You can trust us here at OCP. The encryption backdoors we include in your autonomous vehicle's operating systems can only be accessed by authorized police personnel. Your safety is our number one priority®.

Also he did a "dash cam" box lock break-in as well. A matter of seconds. Great show.

"The National Institute of Justice, the RAND Corporation and the Police Executive Research Forum want to give law enforcement real-time access to autonomous vehicles."

Remember those names.

Yikes.

This moves things further forward into the non-ownership model of usage for autonomous vehicles. If you're in one of these cars, you're effectively in a taxi and its going to be up to the driver what to do if the police show up. So probably you should just hail an autonomous vehicle, not buy one.

Future makes me shudder, at least in this version:

> “Operators could face fines to the extent the car is not being operated in fully autonomous mode. For instance, the operator of a SAI L4/L5 car could be to blame if the systems had been inappropriately overridden (speeding due to fabricated medical emergency).”

“Waymo’s cars are designed to pullover if they detect a police or emergency vehicle flashing from up to 100 feet away. After stopping, the car is unlocked and the windows roll down automatically, allowing Waymo’s support team to interact with law enforcement representatives via an intercom system.”

That sounds like they stop based on visual detection. Makes it a bit too easy to get robbed or worse, doesnt it? A bad actor just has to trigger the right responses and the victim is absolutely unprotected. Not even the car doors will protect.

So, in an emergency situation, how should the police hail or if necessary a true autonomous vehicle to stop? The technological solutions are alarming, but so are the low-tech solutions like stingers and firearms.

Ideally if a passenger is onboard, they should turn on their lights and sirens. The passenger can instruct the vehicle to pull over.

What if there’s no passenger onboard?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477080/

That's a problem. Perhaps cars shouldn't be driving around empty?

So you want to make unoccupied autonomous cars illegal?

I don’t think I agree that autonomous cars should never be allowed to drive around without a person.

If they can really be proven to be safer than a person (in terms of fatalities and crashes per 100 million miles driven) then I think there are a lot of really great things that would be possible.

Under that scenario, what business would the police have pulling it over via backdoor? Why not contact the operator, or perhaps just follow it to the destination?

There are also tire grappling devices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esJ-Fo6XAv8

What it’s speeding, or clearly malfunctioning in a way that endangers others? What if the car plates come up as stolen?

I mean it’s basically all the same reasons why police stop you today so this discussion will basically boil down to whether you think police have the right to stop a person.

Sure you can send a request to stop it, but what if the person is not available or not responding?

Tire grappling devices seem like a last resort that endanger the car, the police, and potentially the people around the car.

Right, that's a issue if we start from the premise of

>If they can really be proven to be safer...

As long as we are playing the game of "what if", there are unending hypothetical abuse scenarios for backdoor access. Malicious actors have a history of exploiting backdoors that are supposedly only for the good guys.

There is also the possibility that law enforcement may not always operate in a responsible or honorable manner.

The issue of police being empowered to stop a person is separate.

https://www.wired.com/2015/09/gm-took-5-years-fix-full-takeo...

>“We basically had complete control of the car except the steering,” says Karl Koscher, one of the security researchers who helped to develop the attack.

There are any number of hypothetical scenarios you could develop from this. Hence my link to IMDB. The only limit is your imagination.

These are not crazy what if games that I’m imagining. They are scenarios that happen every day. My car had its license plate stolen last week and I think it makes sense for the police to stop cars without a license plate.

Year 2025: "I work for Uber. My job is to sit in the self-driving car the whole day. The car can drive itself, but the law doesn't allow that, so I have to sit there. My title is 'legal compliance associate'."

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

- Attributed to Warren Bennis

1) The car can have different behaviour if a passenger is onboard or not. Most passenger cars already disable the passenger side airbag if no one is sitting in the passenger seat.

2) If I’m not in my car and it’s driving around, and police pull it over, and it unlocks its doors and rolls down its windows, do the police need a warrant to look inside my car?

Your doors will unlock if you set off your airbags and it can cause a fuel pump shut-off.

You will need to make sure you deactivate this, and I guess the airbags, if ramming a road block or such things in current cars.

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/how-to-ram-through-a...

Yeah, that is really bad... but on the other hand, is it reasonable to allow 4 thousand pound cars to accelerate and steer however their software makes them? Seems reasonable that when there's a human inside that the car obey that human and nobody else, but if it's on the move without a person then surely somebody has to be able to stop it if something goes wrong.

It brings an interesting question... can an individual really own or be responsible for an automated vehicle? If you summon it to pick you up and it runs someone over along the way, should you be liable for that?

STANDARDS. STANDARDS. STANDARDS.

We need for both such hails & also for evaluating autonomy in comparison with human drivers in a sim/realistic track/course for high speed events/emergencies like traffic accidents, using historical data.

Can't wait for the first carjacker to be given a free ride to a police station in a self driving car.

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