Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason -- making way for ambulances, stopping for firefighters, being pulled over for a faulty headlight.

Surely Cruise and Waymo have thought about this. Curious how it's supposed to work normally, and whether something about it failed in this case?

How is an official supposed to get a moving autonomous vehicle to stop or obey non-standard directions (back up to make room for a fire truck)? Is it supposed to require any special training on the part of officials, or are remote operators supposed to always be watching for it? And what happens if the regular communications channel to remote operators fails?

View on HN

> Surely Cruise and Waymo have thought about this. Curious how it's supposed to work normally

I was in a Waymo that encountered a fire engine parked in the center of an intersection. Traffic was stopped already when we arrived. We were maybe three cars back. Our light was red and no one was directing traffic. I recall the car acting a little hesitant as we came to a stop. It pulled towards the curb a bit and might have stuttered rather than coming to a completely smooth stop. Either way, the first car at the light went right on red. And we pulled up smoothly to fill the gap. When our light turned green, the Waymo waited a bit for the first car to go. Slowly crept past the fire engine in the open lane, and accelerated somewhat aggressively away. I literally whooped.

My assumption is that the software flagged the situation to an operator and they were able to instruct it in the time we were stopped. I heard from a friend that the car basically prompts the operator with a few pre-planned choices to select among — so the car is following a route it planned, but it provides the operator with options to keep the human in the loop for the tricky decision while still allowing autonomous driving execution (no remote direct driving is allowed iiuc).

There should be a protocol where emergency workers can set up a geofence where cars are not allowed. Driverless cars can automatically avoid the geofence. Drivered cars can pop up an alert.

With that approach let's hope we never run out of bandaids and doubly that it's not a bandaid with a Dino pattern that the car doesn't know.

Of course, because emergency workers would love nothing more than arrive to a location, pull up their phone, open the Block-a-Car app, manually draw a fence with touch controls, then do it ten more times because no self driving constructor wanted to standardise on a single app. While, of course, a house is burning, a person is dying in the streets, etc.

No. The alert is the lights and sirens, and any driverless car unable to respond to that signal should be banned from roads. Emergency services have other things to do than draw a geofence so that Waymo can keep making money off of their collected data.

I agree. It could be as simple as a stop button on the outside, or just any kind of contact on the front hood. Press it and the car stops until a remote operator resets it.

> Surely Cruise and Waymo have thought about this

No worries, I bet they've factored the cost of the resulting fines neatly into their pricing model!

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason.

In that case it would also need to tell the difference between a cop and someone impersonating a cop, or it's going to be really easy to mess with self-driving cars.

Doesn't seem fair to expect self driving vehicles to perform a task that humans can't. It's easy to impersonate a cop and interfere with traffic, and human drivers would be tricked too.

> Doesn't seem fair to expect self driving vehicles to perform a task that humans can't.

That is literally the sales pitch. They're supposed to be better at driving than humans. And that actually means all of it, not just lane-keeping on well marked brightly lit highways.

> They're supposed to be better at driving than humans. And that actually means all of it

Why? Couldn't it be "better at driving than humans" by reducing the most common errors (lapses in attention), while performing about the same as humans in less common situations (cop impersonators)?

No, they're supposed to be approximately as good at driving as humans.

The whole "sales pitch" is that it doesn't take any human effort to do.

> supposed to be approximately as good at driving as humans

They're supposed to be cheaper. Being as good is the limiting factor. Being cheaper is the pitch.

I mean you could just stand in front of a self-driving car and it'll probably stop rather than swerve around you, I imagine. There was an episode of revisionist history that discussed this a bit https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/i-love-y...

I wouldn't be willing to bet my life on any self-driving car doing either of those things.

You first!

In the submitted article it says firefighters stood in front of the car to stop it and it just continuously kept creeping forward anyway.

That sounds like a them problem—society won’t change any practices to accommodate these toys that are demonstrating how little value they bring every day.

You mean the same society that built thoroughfares, roads, stop lights, and laws for the benefit of transporting people and goods? Why wouldn't they modify the infrastructure to save a substantial fraction of the costs?

Transportation is literally the 2nd greatest household expense [1], and the cost is dominated by labor. I'm not sure how you could conclude that the potential for massive savings is a "toy".

https://20somethingfinance.com/transportation-costs/

Because if transportation decisions were driven by total cost to society, we would already have trains and transit. Instead, the costs are split among multiple entities, and weighed by planners and politicians against cost of new things, community preferences and personal preferences and commercial desire for profit.

Ableism at its finest. If these actually deliver on driverless cars it will be a boon to people who can’t drive. And that completely ignores the value in letting people work while they commute and the reduced loss of life from wrecks.

There's some truth to this. See "US Marines defeat DARPA robot by hiding under a cardboard box"[1] which is another case of fooling AI.

Whether we want it to be or not, vision AI at the moment is somewhat an idiot-savant when it comes to interacting with the real world.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34518299

> someone impersonating a cop

A RFID tag would do. If you prefer going dystopia, a chip implant.

AI being able to tell an "RFID" chip is real vs fake is not much different than telling whether someone in a fake cop outfit is real or not.

And I mean given RFID is only detectable from inches to feet range, what's the point? And isn't under skin chip just RFID under the skin?

That would go great in the US. Try to tell a cop that you're going to come close and grab their arm to check their chip after they stopped you. I'm sure they'll take it super nicely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com