Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
So the car just circles around it indefinitely.
There will always be room for improvement. The best you can do is to make them vanishingly rare.
Maybe driverless cars should have remained a relic of 80s Schwarzenegger movies.
I'm unfamiliar - we have these in train cars, did the architects behind driverless techshit not think it was necessary?
There should be an emergency "pull over and stop gracefully" button.
So even if the vision/pathfinding believes there is nowhere to park and nowhere else to turn, it will still coast to a stop in a way that is not inherently less-safe than a more-normal car running out of gas and stalling on the road.
And yes, passengers should absolutely be able to bring their vehicle to an immediate stop. It's an "emergency break"! Of course you need an emergency break in an autonomous car! What exact alternative are you proposing for when you're in an AI-operated car hurtling under the chassis of a white truck that it failed to detect in snow conditions?
It seems like an incredibly obvious and basic legislative requirement for self-driving cars to have some kind of immediate manual break for emergencies. I'm kind of shocked that that apparently isn't the case now?
But GM already has this capability with OnStar. Stolen vehicles can be slowed down then stopped and and disabled remotely.
otherwise they should simply be banned
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42117343
From @simonw back then,
>Yes, there's a "pullover now" button on the dashboard at all times.
Well, doesn't seem to be the case here.
According to his spokesperson, he wasn't aware of it.
Imagine letting a passenger in a car use the e-brake at any time.
It's a tricky problem.
Alright, I'm imagining. Seems extremely sensible, especially in an AI-operated vehicle.
Much of the world (the US being an outlier) puts passenger-facing emergency breaks in every carriage of passenger trains.
Clearly autonomous vehicles need e-stops, like all automated machines.
What if there were a:
medical emergency of the passenger
crash up ahead
fire up ahead
earthquake
flood
malfunction of the driverless car
really anything that would make you pull over your actual car to the side of the road for your own safety or emergent needs.
And then you have to imagine if so, even with an e-stop button are you in a less safe situation if you do not have ability to reach the wheel from the back seat.
Those are concerns that would give me pause.
He was "not immediately aware" of it and "did not have an opportunity to use it."
~you can see in the video that it's not showing that button on the screen though.~
It's riding in a robot with no reliable safety fencing. This is the mayhem these companies are subjecting the general public to.
He didn't even miss his flight.
Like 90% of our news. Even the weather is like all drama "atmospheric cyclone tsunami" and ends up as light rain with some flooding, like last year.
And a super typhoon on vacation.
That kind of remote control opens up the possibility - maliciously or accidentally, likely or unlikely - for every Waymo in the fleet to abruptly stop, regardless of whether it's safe to do so. That scenario is orders of magnitude worse than "sometimes a Waymo gets lost in a parking lot and it takes a thirty second call to fix it".
Ideally, in the future you would have to expressly press some button to send an OTP to someone you wanted to allow to control your car, with fine-grained permissions.
Will that future happen? Probably not, and we'll probably see extreme corpgov oversight and mass reduction in individual freedom in return for convenience.
Anyway, I was only responding to OP's claim that support for remote access capabilities could lead to an exploit: There's already remote access capabilities in these cars.
The guy kept filming for under sixteen seconds after asking about and receiving clarification that she is unable to intervene with the car and needs him to use the app. I like the idea that this somehow indicates bad faith or ineptitude in your estimation.
Passenger:1 Google: 0
Let's see how that works out when we're doing 65mph in an autonomous drone car with no steering wheel.
Why are you trying to offer an excuse for the inexcusable?
The app should have nothing to do with it. Where are the emergency stop and exit controls for the passenger? He should be able to exit the vehicle at any time.
I fed up with this bad tech and the fact that governments let Big Tech act irresponsibly to get away with this shit. Why aren't there regulations in place before this tech is allowed loose on an unsuspecting public?
If CEOs of tech companies were held directly responsible with the threat of jail time it'd stop almost instantly.
This poor man was forced to slowly circle around a parking lot eight times! It took over five minutes before they fixed the problem! He almost missed his flight! Outrage, outrage.
This is clearly worthy of the electric chair.
The real problem these days is that the culprits who perpetrate this shit are able to hide behind corporate walls—at worst the company gets fined (albeit rarely) but those who are actually responsible escape both freely and anonymously. Laws need to be changed to make employees directly accountable for their actions and to take the consequences.
Unfortunslely, introducing such laws is somewhat complicated and would meet with huge resistance for many reasons too involved to list here. Nevertheless, there's one I should mention, sometimes unavoidable mistakes occur (or important facts remain unknown) even after due diligence and rigorous testing. Laws should not hold individuals responsible for force majeure† (so-called acts of God) that they have no control over. Any change in the law would have to allow for this.
That said, we know damned well that that provision/exception is totally irrelevant in most of these cases/customer unfriendly fuck-ups, clearly they're as guilty as hell.
I'd advocate another change in the law in that shareholders need to be identifiable. We need a way of publicly embarrassing and shaming shareholders when they invest in 'carpetbagger' companies. To avoid shame investors who invested in good faith would be left with little option than to divest themselves of their shares. In effect, shareholders have to share the responsibility for a company's bad behavior and be seen doing so.
Mind you, I can't see this happening anytime soon, as many shareholders are just too greedy to allow laws like this to come into effect. Unfortunately, the political will just isn't there.
_
† A classic example of where hubris, cocksureness, cost cutting and insufficient engineering rigor — AND force majeure led to a disaster was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. If engineering rigor had been followed to the letter and penny-pinching avoided then it's likely the bridge wouldn't have collapsed despite force majeure entering the scene (the physics of Kármán vortex street turbulence was not well understood at the time).
This is a unironically a great signal society is willing to accept self driving cars. Even computer security isn't this good at playing blame the user.
The signal you're seeing is the tendency of tech people to consider any risk to human safety to be less important than the benefits of the technology itself, and to always blame the human and never the tech.
You also see this manifest in any conversation about the failure modes of AI, in the inevitable knee-jerk response of "humans also do x."
Surely every driverless vehicle ought to have a button that when pressed gracefully stops the car so the passengers can safely exit.
Every (modern) car I’ve been in, driverless or not, will lock the doors once the vehicle is in motion - automakers are not in the habit of letting passengers fall into the road like that. Just imagine the lawsuits…
You don’t want a locked door preventing you from exiting the car if you have a crash.
I'd also submit that in any case where I'd open the door while the vehicle is in motion, I'd have a damned good reason for wanting to do so[0] and would not take kindly to being thwarted.
[0] Usually: backing the plow truck up to a small, flat utility trailer that's invisible through the rear window.
I would actually be surprised of the opposite (not being able to leave a vehicle because the doors are locked). This sounds very scary in an emergency situation where you have to leave the vehicle
My two-door had them disabled by default and it's not uncommon for taxis and rideshares to disable them.
It seems insane not to disable them in a Waymo - you wouldn't be able to escape in an emergency.
Yeah, why didn't he just jumped out of a moving car, right?
She should have stopped the car immediately after she became aware of the situation, within the first few seconds of the call. She kept following this dumb scripted conversation as if it was someone calling support because their router won't turn on. What an absolute shit display of incompetence and recklessness.
Same situation as this guy and the “End Ride” button. It’s actually horrifying.
Might as well design a desktop environment that forces you to enter your password in order to log off.
Are door handles evil? Find out this weekend on Hacker News as it explores the concept of clicking “End Trip” on an app dispatched taxi ride that was embarked on by app.