Researchers fool self-driving cars with stickers on street signs (2017)

Also something that fools humans about street signs would probably also fool AI

Either way you're defacing infrastructure in a way that's potentially dangerous. It's just that the particular failure cases for an AI is different (and somewhat incomprehensible) to humans.

Of course, a self driving system could also be linked to a network that has redundant information about the road and could also broadcast its position and immediate intent to all other nearby self driving systems.

Now, on the other hand. If a police officer sees a missing stop sign, then it's pretty obvious that there is something that needs to be reported and addressed. However, if there's a small sticker on a stop sign (possibly something even confusable as just dirt or bird poop) then it might not be obvious that this represents a road hazard.

Edit: Also, I think that many of the casualties resulting from autonomous vehicles will be situations that humans could have easily avoided (vs. lots of saved situations where humans couldn't have done anything).

People often pitch this view but don’t provide real numbers.

Basically I prefer to be exposed to risks that a human "can't" avoid than from something like this which a human wouldn't do: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/tesla-firetruck-car-c...

And very rightly so. Someone who never drinks under influence and nearly always drives during the day (say to/from school) and is driving since 30 years has a probability so much lower to be involved in a deadly crash than a 18 years old on alcohol or drug driving on a Saturday night that it'd require much more than a 90% drop for that person to be safer by moving to a self-driving car if they were to only create 90% less accidents.

Here's something totally bonkers: in several statistics the car brand the less involved in car crashes (per miles or per 1000 cars of that brand or per anything you want) is...

Porsche.

You read that correctly. And it's not because Porsche repeatedly gets amazing short braking distances compared to other car brands: it's because young inexperienced people don't have the means to buy a Porsche (and Porsche are still pretty much regular cars, not crazy nervous stuff like Ferrari or Lamborghini).

If self-driving cars could be implicated in 90% less accident, the winning strategy would very likely be something like this: "put anyone under 25 years (and over a certain age too) in a self-driving car".

And maybe, maybe, once self-driving cars are implicated in 99% less accidents, experienced drivers never driving under influence would accept to move to self-driving cars.

There's absolutely no reason that those the less likely to have crashes should be moving to cars that are less likely to create crashes for those the most likely to be implicated in crashes.

"Moving everybody to self-driving cars" is the wrong way to think about the issue.

It's the segment at risks that should be moved to self-driving cars.

People just look at the total number of accidents and don't realize that "Porsche on the highway driven by an experienced drive bringing his kids back from school during daytime" is not anywhere near as likely as having a serious crash compared to "teenager on alcohol or drugs driving on a secondary road on a Friday night".

They're not even comparable. A rounding error.

Put it this way: it you were to get a 90% by moving everybody to self-driving car, you'd get an even bigger than 90% drop by moving only those in the segment at risks to self-driving cars.

And then, later on, once self-driving cars drive near perfection, you can move everybody to self-driving cars.

P.S: and to put things into perspective, we're talking about self-driving cars being fooled by stickers or bird poo on street signs. There's still some way to go.

[1] Man beats machine at Go, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/man-b...