Unlike with human drivers that may not stop if they believe they are in danger of getting carjacked I assume an autonomous system will be required to avoid hitting a human at all cost.
Everyone is always a few seconds away from having access to terrible crimes.
The mere introduction of new forms of crime does not necessarily lead to an increase in criminality. Nor does reactive policies to specific criminal narratives necessarily reduce it.
In other words, it's going to happen, just like every other crime already does. Existing infrastructures of human society can easily facilitate this new form of misconduct.
I believe accessibility may increase the frequency someone attempts a crime but not the number of people who will engage in it.
Think about grocery stores ... many leave items outside the store. You're expected to inconveniently walk in and pay for it.
Yet do you see people rampantly ripping off those potted plants or cantaloupes? Although that crime is highly accessible it doesn't happen.
Now if we were to leave cigarettes out there, of course it would disappear. But the question here is whether there would be more thieves or just more thievery from the same individuals?[1]
The theory is that certain people have relationship dynamics to society which in their mind, justifies these actions. This theory supports looting grocery stores during some catastrophic natural disaster. Under this theory, if you can change the dynamics by which someone identifies with society, you'd see fewer issues.
But this is mere speculation. Is there any literature on this?
----
1. In the lens of this theory, one may claim looting cigarettes is part of their terrible nicotine addiction. This unfortunate narrative constitutes an (unjustifiable) reason to steal the item. The idea "I'm a screw up so this is the role I play in society" is a very Zimbardo-prison way of looking at things - but I think it's unfortunately true.
so can an autonomous vehicle. in fact it has to be able to do that to avoid certain kinds of accidents.
The only one of those that is more true of a human driver is the first one.
As others said, the truck might call 911 before it has come to a stop. Also, 911 operators might get a remote override switch that allows them to instruct the truck to take some evasive action.
I do expect additional laws in the area of autonomous cars, but not to prevent robberies. If autonomous cars become really, really, good and ubiquitous, there is no reason for pedestrians to watch out for cars when crossing a street. That will lead to some funny, but disruptive (for the flow of road traffic) videos on YouTube (yes, you can play Frogger on a 8-line highway with your eyes closed and survive. The crocs aren't robots yet, though)
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I don't know about the US, but here in Germany the autobahn is supposed to be off-limits for people (and vehicles with a design speed below 60km/h for that matter). This is obviously to allow drivers to drive with the assumption that they don't have to be ever-vigilant about cyclists or children crossing the street.
Autonomous vehicles will likely operate on the same assumptions to behave more optimally given the constrained environment, i.e. drive in a more aggressive manner than they would do in a city.
I.e. strolling at moderate pace over a highway would probably have about the same risk as hiding ducked behind a parked car to jump in front of a bus in the city. Both are situations that no sane person should engage in and both are considered acceptable risks not worth defending against.
I'd be surprised if autonomous vehicles are allowed to drive faster than manual vehicles any time soon.
There are significant efficiency gains that can be obtained on highways and for road convoys.
And I expect that what constitutes an acceptable risk will go down and down, as long as technology allows for it. It's already happening al the time. Seat belts are compulsory, air bags are compulsory, ABS is compulsory, etc.
But yes, the frog get thing is not something I would advise to do. On the other hands certainly, in cities, it will be much, much safer for pedestrians to step out into traffic without paying much attention to that traffic. That will affect how pedestrians behave.
Well, I do think that the risk of pedestrians on the autobahn isn't something we optimize for.
In the city? Yes.
Reducing the risks of occupants? Yes.
Driving defensively on the autobahn because someone might walk into the traffic? No.
The potential optimizations for the restricted environment that will be made there will be for increased traffic flow, more flexible lane switching or things like that. Maybe even saving fuel by driving in the tailwind of another vehicle.
The laws of physics will still impose lower limits on stopping distances, and pedestrians who willfully cause abrupt stoppages resulting in juries or property damage will have the book thrown at them - by that stage most vehicles are likely to have multiple cameras built in that will help identify the perpetrators of such acts.
Also, as pointed out elsewhere, vehicles will probably call 911 automatically as soon as the probability of an accident spikes.
Unless a whole group of people starts crossing the road all at the same time and holding hands (in which case, well, you can't stop people from committing mass suicide I guess), even a very rapidly moving car should be able to swerve out of its way to avoid a pedestrian walking across a motorway, so long as it detects said pedestrian at a sufficient distance.
If you assume that the self-driving cars talk to each other, then each has access to the sensors of the cars far ahead in front, so even in busy traffic they should be able to detect a pedestrian standing by the side of the motorway and start adjusting their flow accordingly, well ahead of any drunken stumbling by said pedestrian.
Unlike human drivers, cars can adjust their trajectories at high speed with minimal risk of accident.
... assuming perfect weather and perfect street surface conditions.
I expect that insurance companies will eat the cost of hijackings, but push for more effective enforcement of existing laws, leveraging the surveillance capabilities of autonomous vehicles.
You also can't threaten a computer to stop it from immediately calling the police. A human driver might fear for his life and delay contacting the police until the encounter is over, but the computer driver could immediately call the police the moment it thinks it is being hijacked.
- The driving algorithm will need to be capable of causing a 911 call to be made for various reasons, including that
- When there is no human driver, a carjacking is not actually that bad. There is insurance for this kind of problem, and it will be up to insurance companies to figure out if it's even worth attempting to mitigate.
So the robbers wear masks and shoot / paint over / jam the video equipment. They can do this at a distance because there is no risk of hitting a human.
> - The driving algorithm will need to be capable of causing a 911 call to be made for various reasons, including that
So the robbers choose a section of road far away from the nearest police and otherwise conducive at making them difficult to follow.
> - There is insurance for this kind of problem
If it gets to be too frequent of a problem, the insurance will become expensive enough that it will be easier just to keep a human around on more dangerous routes.
Doing any of that would create a very distinct MO. You want to avoid that if you want to avoid being caught.
Also, have you seen how small cameras are these days? Maybe you could load up a crop-duster with paint and cover the whole truck, but there is no way you could hope to successfully shoot out every camera an insurance company could stick on a truck.
> "So the robbers choose a section of road far away from the nearest police and otherwise conducive at making them difficult to follow."
A problem not made any worse by driverless vehicles. If anything, you can program a truck to always follow approved routes while with human drivers you have to account for insubordination.
Crime is all about risk management. Sloppy purchases could leave a trail, yes, but video evidence can also leave a trail. One trail is easier to cover than the other: lots of people buy paint and guns, not many rob trucks.
> have you seen how small cameras are these days?
This isn't hide-and-seek. The game is not over for the perp if a shitty miniature camera buried in the truck's frame catches a few blurry frames of a masked man. I was responding to the "just do machine learning on LIDAR data" proposal that got thrown out elsewhere in the thread. Equipment that can reliably identify people who control the physical situation and don't want to be identified is probably expensive and vulnerable. Making it relatively invulnerable makes it even more expensive.
> A problem not made any worse by driverless vehicles
Yes, precisely. They never were a deterrent and "just call 911" was/is not going to stop robbers. The deterrent is sitting in the cab.
The sort of MO that I am talking about is "Always shoots out the cameras after stopping the truck, using a rifle" (or whatever the specific details happen to be).
The reason you do not want to establish this sort of MO is that it allows the police/FBI to connect different incidents, different truck hijackings, and figure out that they were all perpetrated by the same gang of criminals.
Once they do this, they can begin analysing where and when you are likely to strike in the future. They can use information such as "This gang was out committing crime on April 15th, June 3rd and July 18th" to narrow down their list of suspects, eliminating people who might be matches for one date/location but not for the others.
> "This isn't hide-and-seek."
When you are talking about shooting out cameras, it really is. I mean, ignoring the hollywood silliness of it, chances are you are going to be in that cameras field of view before you shoot it, and any footage that camera already shot will not be destroyed by the bullet smashing the lense. The LIDAR is really not going to be the primary source of information about the thieves anyway, the cameras will be.
> "They never were a deterrent and "just call 911" was/is not going to stop robbers."
Calling 911 is about catching robbers, not deterring them. The sooner the police arrive on the scene, the more likely the criminals will be caught.
How fast does the average truck hijacking happen? How fast does it happen when the truck that is being robbed has been immobilized? Maybe you can get the trailer off and onto another truck, but that takes time and could be hindered any number of ways. Immobilizing the truck isn't a good idea when there is a human driver that could be harmed, but with a self-driving truck there is no reason why it wouldn't be done.
On the contrary, payouts for a driver taken hostage, injured, or killed on company business would be immense. Insurance companies would probably be quite happy about crimes taking place without humans getting hurt anymore.
Having a human present is a significant deterrent against robbing in the first place and against liberal use of firearms because if things go south with a human present then the charge is murder. A robotic truck presents no such deterrent. Lower the risk of knocking off a truck, and more trucks will get knocked off.
I'm not saying it can't be solved, I'm just saying that the solution won't be "buy insurance."
The implication is that if some of our roads gradually become devoid of humans, robbing automated vehicles will become a "thing". It doesn't actually sound that far fetched, really. It would presumably be safer for the crooks than robbing a real truck today for three reasons: 1) they wouldn't have to threaten a human (thus lowering the stakes if they get caught), 2) the trucks likely would not be built to shoot back (think of the potential liability for the trucking company if it were), 3) the trucking companies would likely not put much energy into pursuing the criminals, so long as the losses were small in the grand scheme of things.
It's similar to the notion of people shooting down delivery drones and stealing the packages. People will do it, and it will likely be tolerated to some small degree. Even today we already have people stealing packages off doorsteps, although there is occasionally vigilante justice in those cases:
http://noevalleysf.blogspot.com/2012/11/crime-beat-suspected...