Guy Points a Gun at Google Streetview Car | Hacker News Reader

Guy Points a Gun at Google Streetview Car

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37 pointsjessicaSFNY26 comments

Open articleView on HN

http://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?13987-Baby-Zyia-...

"Body of missing toddler found in a junk-filled closet"

http://news.yahoo.com/video/detroitwxyz-20910802/body-of-mis...

SAME HOUSE! WTF!

Doesn't surprise me.

I used to live in Nottingham in the UK. You could see hookers on streetview. It destroyed the property prices in the area in question.

Jon Rafman maintains a fantastic, ongoing picture essay using Street View:

http://9-eyes.com/

I wish this guy listed the locations where these were taken - or am I missing it?

See my comment above. The sites where the pictures were originally found generally have a link to Google Maps for each image.

These pictures are all taken from other Google Street View gallery sites, with the location information removed and the source uncredited.

Do you have any additional details on this? If he found these locations via another site, is there something ethically wrong with what he's doing here? Or is the issue that he is just grabbing the original screenshot? What if he takes a screenshot of their screenshot?

I know it's not original content, but if he is collecting and republishing interesting images that other people have spent their time looking for (rather than trawling through Street View himself), then he should credit the source.

I run such a site myself and have been accused of stealing from Rafman's gallery, which is impossible as he does not list the location for each image.

A couple of recent ones:

http://www.mapcrunch.com/s/72721_40ea8d2c http://www.mapcrunch.com/s/73672_22c31f74

What pains me is that after reading this article, the only thing I could think about was how the article contained the overused word 'like' in a sentence as if it was written by a 15 year old high school girl.

'Except for like, when you drive through a rough urban area and happen to have a large gun pointed at you.'

Haha, you ruined the article for me. I wonder if the guy driving the car even noticed, or was otherwise distracted by counting the minutes till he could get done with that area.

Michigan isn't known as the murder mitten for nothing.

Once Google has perfected their driverless car, it won't be an issue to driver safety.

Hypothetical: Google develops autonomous self-driving cars and uses them to drive around updating map and street view data. Let's suppose the cars have pretty good AI that not only deals with driving, but also handles deciding where to go. One of the goals the AI seeks is to avoid dangerous situations and minimize damage to the car.

Suppose some of these cars figure out that certain neighborhoods are "bad": people are more likely to shoot them there, or stop them and steal parts from them. The AI decides to avoid those neighborhoods, and uses its machine learning algorithms to learn to predict bad neighborhoods based on its prior experience with other neighborhoods.

Why a particular neighborhood is "bad" is usually a result of the interplay of many complex social and economic factors. Poverty correlates well with badness, for example.

But the car probably doesn't have poverty data. It has to rely on observables. One observable that correlates reasonably well with poverty is race. Note this is just a correlation, not causation. But the car doesn't care. It just cares about the correlation.

So the car starts avoiding neighborhoods where it sees a lot of black people!

It will be interesting to see how society deals with that. It raises lots of interesting ethical and legal issues.

This might sound more subtle and less plausible than it really is. In Chicago, Google maps frequently gives me directions that I immediately discard because I am not going to drive across Kostner & Chicago at 11PM at night. I don't even really have to notice to map around the spots I don't want to drive through, because the map is advisory. Maps are less advisory in autonomous cars.

I guess it depends on how the cars were programmed to learn. Is perceiving a threat something that would be in the scope of the car's programming? Would the developers have accounted for the possibility of cataloging and identifying not only firearms but also the usage of those firearms. How much damage would a car suffer from a firearm compared to a pothole at 50 mph?

It would be much easier and more likely for the developers to account for hazards that affect the functionality of the car. Sensors that monitor brakes, shocks, tire pressure etc. The car could then learn to adapt to certain road types and avoid others altogether. If the cars were given AI that would concern itself with minimizing damage they would be more likely to avoid towns with the worst road care.

Poorly written article, I agree! However, the comments section contains uncountable kernels of white nationalist wisdom. What woodwork did these people come out of?

Looks like a shotgun to me, but the image is blurry.

Lol,

The image is way too blurry to say even that. It could even be a airsoft gun.

It doesn't even have to be a gun. Watch out for the NYPD...

Especially since they're in Detroit.

Yeah, could also be any number of star wars weapons. Probably not a light saber, though.

It could be a light sabre but the blade of plasma just isn't activated.

I don't think fools in the D are posted up with an airsoft gun....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz7sCBoZiO8

Naturally if you are shooting around priavte property without owners permission and regard to privacy, you may get shot.

Is there really much of an expectation of privacy on a front porch though?

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