Such kinds of problems will only scale up as we apply L5 cars take on more public roads, but I wonder how long or what changes will have to be done in current road signs, critical city infra to support them.
A car shouldn't make that call. It should err on the side of safety and assuming the emergency is real.
When you see flashing lights on the highway coming up behind you, do you think "I bet that ambulance is faking it so they can get home faster", or do you just move over?
I think the simple truth is that we are still a long long long time away from fully autonomous cars to be safely deployed anywhere except on very specific paths that are mostly closed off to everyone else.
But they could be tremendously useful there, for instance driving buses or airport shuttles and that kind of thing.
Note that when I am doing traffic direction with appropriate authority, most drivers will never have heard of the organization I'm a part of (a local CERT team), nor have any real way to vet the authority I have. The authority they can determine I have is mostly that I'm doing it and no police officer has come by to tell me to stop doing it.
(Note that CERT members do not and should not self-deploy, mind you, and if you choose not to heed our directions, we almost certainly can find a cop car to come let you know you screwed up.)
Also bear in mind, many people directing traffic aren't public safety personnel at all. Construction workers are private employees, events have their own staff which direct traffic in various contexts, including public roads.
There's no definitive way to determine that someone is authorized to direct traffic, cars just need to obey them.
Exactly! But there still is a way. You don't obey anyone in any circumstances because that would be dangerous. People have a feeling for it, computers don't yet.
Does the computerized car understand the meaning of the words "Turn back because the bridge is out"?
Essentially the same that you said.
This is something that people are very good at judging but software isn’t.
I’m trying to say that until we have figured out AGI, autonomous cars driving among people are very dangerous.
Imagine a teenager, dressed in street wear, who jumps into the middle of a street to stop traffic in a way that has no explanation given the scene, while their friends laugh on the sidewalk as they observe.
Or a group of men in masks stopping a car in an alley as their accomplices surround the vehicle.
Any human driver will recognize these scenarios as illegitimate. It isn't just the act of directing traffic that is judged in isolation.
Legitimacy isn't really the problem, it's the circumstance of a human being in front of your car that prevents you from moving forward, and beyond getting out of your car and talking to them, or just waiting, you don't have much of a choice in what options you have.
I agree with the intent of your point, but what's the alternative? You can't just keep driving if someone is standing in the middle of the road.
In the case of an illegitimate request, a human driver might question the request and take a different action instead.
Are you being directed to run a red light? If you judge that someone is maliciously asking you to do so, you probably will choose to remain still instead.
Are you being directed to stop? If you judge that someone is maliciously asking you to do so, you may choose to turn around, reverse, turn into a parking lot or otherwise remove your vehicle from the situation. You don't have to run people over to refuse a command to stop.
And if you were completely blocked from moving, you'd probably call the police.
My point is that "always follow hand signals" is trivially problematic. I would expect that if self-driving cars followed any hand signal they saw, you'd see kids doing it for the lulz on the sidewalk in front of their school. ..."traffic jam challenge". After all, someone is less likely to act maliciously towards a human than they are a machine.
The more important test scenarios are life threatening or unreasonably disruptive situations rather than harmless pranks.
Nowhere near perfect, but that makes it a lot harder than just getting a spike strip or a hand gun or a demolition derby car. We’re talking about people willing to risk a decade in prison to “do criminal things to a car and/or passengers”. How much work do you think they want to put into disabling a car with a remote? Why not just wave a gun in the driver’s face at a stop light?
Reading between the lines it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of communication to emergency services etc on how to deal with autonomous vehicles.
Even the police seem to be operating under misconceptions about what the vehicles can and can’t do.
If self-driving cars cannot cope with this, they should not be allowed on public roads. Very little has convinced me they should currently be street legal.
Will you have to file a CVE after the incident?
Community Emergency Response Team: https://community.fema.gov/PreparednessCommunity/s/welcome-t...
"In the context of war, perfidy is a form of deception in which one side promises to act in good faith (such as by raising a flag of truce) with the intention of breaking that promise ... Perfidy constitutes a breach of the laws of war and so is a war crime, as it degrades the protections and mutual restraints developed in the interest of all parties, combatants and civilians. "
Pretending to surrender is something that's shown a lot in Star Trek and similar shows, and Pirates of the Carribean, but in our real-life world of 2023 it's a UN war crime to pretend to surrender, and it's really not a nice thing to do because if some people sometimes pretend to surrender, then pretty soon no one will trust surrender attempts and people who wanted to stop fighting will needlessly be lost.
The idea of criminals faking a medical emergency is similar imho. If I were in a position of determining how much time robbers should serve in prison, I would personally recommend a much much longer sentence if they faked a medical emergency, for exactly this reason.
I hope that as well, but I think neither the US, Israel nor China will stand idle next to a nuclear power getting dragged in front of the ICC - not with the numerous counts of crimes each of these countries could reasonably be charged with. The Israelis may be the only ones being able to get away with a lot of their stuff given that their opponents continuously enact crimes as well (e.g. hiding military command structures under hospitals and schools), but the US and China? They can't pull that card.
To be fair, the point of the ruse (in real wars; in heroic fiction this sometimes varies) is usually to get people killed, too; the question is just which people get killed.
This one infamous sword fight has now poisoned the well with respect to the global norm. Next time there's some other totally unaffiliated hat-wearing super-powered bandit who's stealing the Ark of the Covenant or the royal diamond or something, if THAT bandit tries to surrender, there's a high chance that person might be killed, because their surrender is distrusted since DragonWriter changed the norm and now every fight between supers and cops is now on "shoot to kill, no prisoners, take no quarter" stakes. Imagine how many times a famous super like Batman would have been killed if the authorities never accept a surrender because the surrender norm is ruined. It can be repaired but that might take a decade or more to repair the trust that was broken.
With strong norms about surrender, red cross medics being protected, etc., we can have things like the miracle of the WW1 Christmas Truce which help the war to be a little bit little less of pure hell, for all the pure-hearted or indifferent people dragged into being a soldier, perhaps even drafted or press-ganged, to be the disposable cannon fodder for a bloody and disease and gas drenched war for no good reason more than rich politicians' egos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce
These people just want to go back home to their wife or their mum and would gladly gladly surrender if given the chance, but that's not possible if someone ruins the norm! It's like, for example even if someone is a super-villain for example, they should really not take human lives of innocent people, or destroy irreplaceable cultural heritage sites, or damage/burn an ecological area like a rain forest, because those, once lost, are forever gone, and leave our world impoverished.
But: fake cops robbing people is pretty common too. Unfortunately.
Even more unfortunate, real cops doing it also happens.
So then you have to teach the car what all the various kinds of emergency vehicles look like, in every jurisdiction. That's hard enough, but then what happens if it's an unmarked police car, for example?
When some idiot in the opposing lanes is waving for me to take a left across multiple lanes of moving traffic, I know that I should ignore their idiotic traffic direction. I know that when there's an emergency situation with a fire fighter telling me to continue through a red light, I know that I should follow the directions.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1958/
A piece of software with some cameras and actuators is really not the same.
If the car has no passenger. Then stop and move slowly as required/indicated. Sure, it may be a car thief, but without a passenger, it is simply another car theft.
“You” in the specific or general sense? Because, my observations of highway behavior suggest that actual humans are…far from ideal at this.
Unfortunately that attitude is common is the industry. The notion that the rest of the world needs to provide extra, up to date information for the shitty AI so it can function.
I have news for ya. Emergency road repairs, fires, etc are not going to make it into your world database in a timely manner so a dumb vehicle can navigate the situation. It will all be over before anyone even thinks about fixing your system for you.
Perhaps autonomous vehicles should be be sensitive to that field, signaling for manual control when they're too near a vehicle which has it enabled. That way any vehicle--not just the fire department--can create a "human control only" field by activating their emergency flashers. Perhaps emergency vehicles could be recognized such that they create a much larger field.
And there are going to be a lot of pranksters who do, and will use them to mess with so-called self-driving cars.
Add that to the _LONG_ list of issues that will have to be solved until we can even think about releasing autonomous cars in the streets.
Dude was totally pissed and gesturing every which way wildly. When I couldn’t immediately decode. He just started swinging even more wildly. Turning redder and redder.
Was fairly sure I was going to get shot arrested. So I just did a U turn. As I was leaving the next guy started yelling at cop that he was blocking all possible routes to his town.
You don’t. Bad actors can already pretend to be fireman doing fireman things and direct traffic. Human drivers will also be mislead by that.
What is more, if you have a high viz vest, a hard hat, and more confidence than a garden slug you can also direct trafic. Not legally mind you, but more often than not people will follow your directions. If there is a whole gaggle of fake construction people and they have cones too they can probably re-route a highway.
Whatever is stopping people from causing misschief (too often) by these “powers” doesn’t seem to be different in the case of self driving cars than with human driven cars. In fact the self-driving car is more likely to retain a perfect photographic evidence of the mischief maker’s face than a regular human driver.