Of course, in the future when all cars are connected (even if they're not self-driving), combining all this sensor data and sending it to the vehicles behind you would save countless lives. The number of times you hear about pile-ups in fog and heavy rain - that could all be avoided by cars talking to each other.
But I'll bet there's still no open (or even closed) standard on inter-manufacturer comms yet?
That does raise interesting security problems though - my car receives a message saying to stop as quickly as possible, how does it decide whether this is a valid message or someone hacking cars for fun?
The same way you determine whether that stop sign is legitimate or not: you don't. You stop regardless of the possibility that the sign was placed there by potential carjackers. Until the hacking risk is demonstrated to be statistically more dangerous than ignoring potential warnings, all warnings will be trusted. Regardless of current proposals, any manufacture that ignores reasonable electronic warnings (ie STOP accident ahead) on technicalities (ie an expired cert) risks serious liability.
This touches on the much more likely scenario whereby the car's internal data doesn't mesh with the data from it's sensors. If the sign says "one way" it is a one way street. What google maps says doesn't matter. Current warning signs trump previously recorded data. "But google maps said I could do 70!" will be no defense.
I don't have an answer for you, but maybe it stems from some sort of idea of identity? Maybe the car sends a message authenticated with your license ID. Cars are (hand waves) able to authenticate the validity of a message. If you send a message saying you were in a collision, that comes with the side effects of saying you were in a collision - emergency contacts and police may be notified, maybe something pings cars registered to you to see if it was actually in an accident based on sensor data. Your insurance rates may go up. If it turns out you were lying, maybe your car gets flagged for repairs next time you try to re-register your tags. Or maybe you are flagged for trolling and you get the "boy who cried wolf" effect.
Sure, the actual vehicle systems had better work and be properly authenticated, and that could be achieved in numerous ways... but none of this stops a hacker war-driving with a laptop, or sitting on an overhead bridge, or on the other side of the world.
There is no doubt that intelligent highways would be a massive target for terrorist and cyber attacks. However, one thing in our favour is the fact there is so little technology already in place, since they won't be burdened with decades' worth of insecure legacy systems: at least they'll be able to start out building infrastructure in full knowledge that it better be secure.
In some ways we have methods to mitigate this already in place. They have, of course, been exposed as insecure when they were implemented badly[1][2]. That being said, there is prior art on this, in nature.
You have your own trusted sources of information, and you have your secondary sources of information, which you apply trust levels to. Your own trusted sources of information are your own senses, your sight, hearing, feeling (touch), smell, etc. You may have something communicated to you about your condition or environment through these senses, but it's silly to take that at face value without confirming with your own senses. If your friend next to you that you trust tells you that you're about to walk into a wall, you look ahead. If you can't see a wall, you might slow and exercise caution until you figure out why you were relayed that information, but unless you can completely stop without problem, you don't do that without cause.
I think it's a mistake to think of cards in the future communicating as a swarm. They need to be able to function independently, and also to take in extra information from the group when the group is available, and make decisions on that. That's less swarm behavior than social behavior, so we should consider groups of cars on the road a social groups, and the same information dynamics exhibited in those groups apply.
Exactly, and it is not just this one case: serious, avoidable security cock-ups have happened every time a new class of device has been put on the internet, with the IoT DDOS debacle being perhaps the latest example.
Sadly, the lessons learned in legacy systems do not necessarily address the problems we have now. Older systems were typically combating noise, signal degradation, power consumption, processor speeds, poor user interface technology, etc. Often they were extremely proprietary and if they included any kind of security it was commonly by obscurity, and even if not, the crypto used would be easily crackable by a modern script kiddie packing Aircrack or similar.
The lesson we do need to learn is future-proofing: whatever infrastructure we install on the millions of miles of public highway will need to be serviceable for decades.
So, a malicious actor could spoof the vehicle of somebody they dislike, and cause their insurance to go up, or pave the path for a later incident, where when police/emergency are contacted, the person is ignored?
Couldn't this be solved better by some form of web of trust (WoT)?
Say your car A trusts other cars B, C ... Y to varying degree in a WoT. It meets a brand new car Z that is not yet trusted by any cars A-Y. Car A receives a message from Z, to which it assigns 0 credence points, meaning this data is not taken into account in any decisions. If car A then makes an observation confirming the message, car A now trusts Z by +1 point, and lets other cars know this. (I'm unsure how to make aggregation/distribution of trust work smoothly, but I believe the random mixing of traffic patterns will work in the system's favor.)
So gradually car Z becomes trusted, up to some maximum, e.g. 100. The only worry then is a malicious actor who mostly sends true messages, but that's hard to distinguish from a car with a sometimes faulty sensor. Those problems could be handled the same way, namely aggressively penalising a car for sending incorrect data (e.g. by -30), such that it's quickly distrusted, together with a prominent warning in the failing car when it goes below 0 trust that it needs maintenance (after which trust would be reset to 0). Possibly also increased insurance premium if your car remains with a trust below 0.
As always Science Fiction swoops in - in the "Culture" series, AI have hardcoded (as in, on their physical hardware) automatic code to shut down external communication in the event external communication is attempting to takeover the AI. I mean your question is pretty much "what would that automatic code look like," and I have no idea. I'm just getting pretty excited about all this sweet stuff happening with AI, automatic cars, hijacking of the human nervous system. Hngg.
> AI have hardcoded (as in, on their physical hardware) automatic code to shut down external communication in the event external communication is attempting to takeover the AI
This sounds very much like you're describing an antivirus program, which we all know works perfectly well /s
I agree, that is probably going to be one of the most difficult problems to solve. However, as we dive headlong into self-driving tech, we are going to have to find an answer since the tech will be so much easier to implement if the vehicles communicate.
You could mostly prevent pile-ups, but pile-ups generally don't kill people. Also, you don't need connected cars to avoid pile-ups, you just need to keep your distance and your eyes (sensors) on the car in front of you. Both of which works pretty well with current (unconnected/unilateral) technology.
Most of the pile-ups that happen around where I grew up were due to thick fog. Where by the time you see the wreckage, it's too late.
Now, that can be solved by people slowing down due to conditions. But how slow is slow enough? Often it's slow enough that the person behind you is gonna wreck into you.
Maybe pile-ups aren't deadly, but wouldn't it be better if we had tech that helped prevent them? Or do maimings not matter?
Where I grew up, it was dense snow, which behaves pretty similarly.
I don't really see the value of saying "human error, so who cares about solving it with tech!" It's human error that happens all the time, and causes plenty of injuries and expense. Falling off a cliff is human error, but we still put up railings where it's likely to happen.
And as you pointed out, it's not human error that a single driver can solve - if you go slow enough to be safe, you're likely to get hit from behind by someone who didn't. Since the reality is that drivers are faced with having no safe strategy, it's a problem I'd love to see solved.
The pileups are 'due' to people going too fast for road and weather conditions. If you can't stop within your length of visibility, you're going too fast, end of discussion.
Without saying this is wrong, I will say it's not at all practical.
I grew up in the northeast. Abrupt and unpredicted snowstorms are common, and some of them are dense enough to drop visibility laughably low - 10-15 mph would offer visible stopping (and be a fairly acceptable speed for a crash regardless). People don't want to take six hours to get home, so they keep driving. If the roads are decent, they keep driving at ~30 mph or faster to make decent time.
So now you have a situation where all the other drivers are exceeding their visibility. If you drop down to 10 mph, you get to be the obstacle they hit at >30 mph when you loom up out of the snow!
The result is that everyone goes 20 mph or faster, because everyone else is. Yes, that's stupid and dangerous. No, there isn't any 'safe' behavior available if you get caught out on those highways.
Wow, I had no idea the situation was that bad in the northeast. That's honestly terrible for a supposedly first-world country. Here are the solutions I've enacted for myself in no particular order:
- Don't live in the northeast.
- Don't drive in bad weather conditions.
- Don't organize your life around automobiles such that you can't manage daily life without one.
Those are all pretty reasonable answers, honestly, and a lot of people who leave the northeast do it in general protest of the winters. Moving closer to the coast will also preserve you from much of this.
All I can really say is that I've definitely been on the road at moments where I realized that 100% of my options were dangerous accident risks. At that point you mostly try to minimize likely crash speed (if everyone goes 15-20 on a divided highway, probably no one will die) and look for an exit.
It is not that simple. "Too fast for road and weather" is a ex post facto determination. If there was a crash, you were going too fast.
Fog is tricky. Fog can give the driver a false sense of security. Modern overly-reflective road markers can, at night, make a driver think they are seeing further through fog than they are. They can see the lines, but can they see the black car parked ahead? Note too that large pile-ups in fog often involve trucks. Imho much of that is because truck trailers have poor running lights. We see the cars ahead. We follow their taillights through the fog. But that black truck flatbed trailer with two tiny red orbs is invisible. Or we think it is further away.
Fog also thickens unevenly. It blows around. Slamming on the brakes immediately upon entering a bank isn't going to make you any friends amongst the people behind you. That truck 4 seconds behind you (a reasonable distance on a highway at night) might not stop as quickly as your ferrari. Truck drivers are also much higher. They may have greater visibility than you and not realize that your sports car places your eyeballs in the low-level fog. The safest bet in traffic is generally not to act abruptly and unexpectedly.
(fyi, a sportbiker's helmeted head is also generally much higher than in cars, even SUVs. They too have better visibility in fog.)
And if you forget to turn on your car's taillights, all is lost. There is a reason that motorcycles have them hardwired on.
Slow enough is slow enough that you can see an obstruction soon enough to stop before driving into it.
Either way, interconnections won't help you -- what if the car is crashed hard enough (or long enough for the battery to run down) that it's beacon is off/broadcasting wrong information? What if there's fallen tree or a pedestrian on the road? Generally, sensors (radar) can see through fog, and that's the most help you're going to get in a situation like this.
Yes, maimings do matter. But they don't count towards "save [ing] countless lives".
> what if the car is crashed hard enough (or long enough for the battery to run down) that it's beacon is off/broadcasting wrong information?
Doesn't that mean we're just back at the situation we're in today? The worse situation?
> What if there's fallen tree or a pedestrian on the road?
Also, not the situation at hand. Talking about the case where a car has crashed and is letting the cars behind it know that it has done so. It's like electronic flare deployment (or hazard lights.)
Don't you think that a lot of lives and livelihoods could be saved if we had such functionality?
Exactly. At best we'll have 15 different standards, and Fords only talk to Fords, Toyotas only talk to Toyotas, and they all speak different incompatible protocols.
Just think of all the integration programming jobs that will be preserved! All of the pointless conference calls and GoToMeetings scheduled weeks in advance between developers and project managers and teams on the other side of the world because someone made a typo in an API specification that could have easily been cleared up in a two-second email.
Good times ahead! The hardware stacks will all likely be different too, so gravy train for all the HW and systems folks too. dozens of companies all re-inventing the same thing is why tech still has full employment.
Actually, the hardware guys already have it solved. We already know how to do bus arbitration, and cars are like little buses.
CANbus could work, and it's already used in the automotive world. It's nice because the higher-priority bus driver is not delayed. Unfortunately, the lower priority one gets run over. Might have to work on that.
Until regulators in a sufficiently large market decides that since the tech is available, either the manufacturers decide on a standard or they get one imposed on them, the same way EU sabre-rattling led to the standardization of mobile chargers.
and all the script kiddies will find it great fun to send out those "collision" signals on a busy roadway just to screw with people. the futures gonna be great!
Of course, in the future when all cars are connected (even if they're not self-driving), combining all this sensor data and sending it to the vehicles behind you would save countless lives. The number of times you hear about pile-ups in fog and heavy rain - that could all be avoided by cars talking to each other.
But I'll bet there's still no open (or even closed) standard on inter-manufacturer comms yet?