Absolutely. I see this here on hacker news with people excited about the notion of doing away with stop lights so that AI traffic can flow easily. People are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians and cyclists. It would not be surprising to see a new crime of "hindering an autonomous automobile" be lobbied for.

It's only a matter of time before some stupid kids start jumping in the way of self-driving cars to make them brake hard. That's when we'll see the anti-pedestrian regulations appear, by my estimation.

Self driving cars are not magic and judging their braking distance is not much easier than with a human driver. I think kids trying that will quickly find out that it's not too hard to make an autocar hit a human. In other words, I think the problem would quickly solve itself.

In bad neighborhoods, the carjackers(might not want a autonomous car though) or robbers might just roll a beach ball into the street to stop the car or maybe just a cheap open umbrella. I can imagine those people who practice "rolling coal" doing the same thing to rich autonomous car riders or just throwing a beach ball out the window on an interstate. Lots of possibilities that security researchers will need to consider.

Rolling a ball on the street is probably enough to stop human drivers as well. Is carjacking that much of a problem where you live? I've never heard of anybody being carjacked here. I guess you could equip your car with one of these devices if you're concerned:

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

A human driver has a good chance to recognize the situation for what it is and just hit the beachball. (Or heck, the hoodlum himself.)

Um where do you think this is happening exactly that people know that beachball = carjacking? Based on the language used, I suspect you aren't in such an area and are coming up with an unrealistic scenario here.

Okay, so we have to suppose we're driving through LA County's Palos Verdes Estates, and a beachball suddenly pops up. Fair enough.

anywhere.

i always bring up the examples of thak thak gangs in delhi to show actual threats which become worse with autonomous cars.

i suspect people in the first world who believe in autonomous cars are exposed to a very limited set of uses for roads and cars.

India is the place where the autonomous car dream goes to die.

after that every downgrades the idea to lower than level 5 driving.

Given that autonomous vehicles are supposed to lower the amount of traffic accidents, they should be programmed to exclude the lethal traffic accidents which are justified (basic on split-second information, live a little). At least beach balls will be relatively easy to recognize with computer vision. Problem is those pesky hoodlums will start dressing up as beach balls, throwing inflatable dolls in front of cars. And if you think that's a crazy idea, just wait and see what the actual future comes up with.

Honestly, the 21st century is basically clickbait: You won't believe what happens next!

I guess flame throwers are somehow cooler than installing bullet proof glass :)

Autonomous cars have a lot of data gathering sensors - even if the car doesn't know something is going on, logs of what happened will greatly aid the police in their efforts to track down the criminal.

If carjacking becomes a problem the cars will figure it out and start locking all the doors. Or if the car is unoccupied, let the carjaker in, then notify the nearest police station it is coming in with a criminal.

You think an unoccupied car should have the ability to lock people in and take them to the police station?

Maybe in situations where someone throws a beach ball in front of your car and your immediate split-second reaction is to turn your car into a murder weapon directed at the first "hoodlum" you spot who may or may not have thrown this ball.

That is a complex question. I see both sides of the issue and a lot of grey area between (I'd be shocked if I foresee even 10% of all the things philosophers will consider).

I'll just say that it is an option with some merit. Depending on the technology and the local situation I might or might not be in favor of it.

Not to mention all autonomous cars will undoubtedly have video evidence of what happened. The kids won't have a chance of proving their case if they get hit.

To be fair, regulations put in place because kids are jumping in front of cars could be anti-pedestrian, but it could also just be anti-fucking-idiot if drafted well.

i don't understand; it is already a violation of traffic law to jump in front of cars. if you survive the punishment meted out by physics, the cops can fine you. what change do you think would be made if folks started doing it more often?

In Chicago, at least, that would be implicitly legal, unless the car actually hits you:

9-60-060 Pedestrian crossing. [...] (b) No pedestrian shall suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield.

https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/cdot/supp_info/o...

Well, if the car doesn't hit you, then clearly there was enough time for the driver to yield :)

So you get get punished if it hits you? Or how does this work...

Yes. If the car hits you because you stepped out in front of it and the car did not have time to stop while going the speed limit with a driver paying attention to the road, the pedestrian is at fault and can be ticketed. If you don't survive the encounter, at the very least the driver doesn't receive a ticket.

Your comment reminded me of a Sci-Fi novel I read when I was a kid, it was a mystery with the background being a fully automated world, a fairly central point was that all vehicles were self-driving. Standing in front of cars to stop them was somewhere between a fad and a minor rebellion against the status quo.

Ever since self-driving cars started being a thing I keep being reminded of this book, and am half-waiting for at lease that part of it to come true.

I've been searching for a bit now, and I still haven't find it. I think it was from the 70s or 80s.

Coils, by Zelazny & Saberhagen? It was first published in 1982.

Bless you, kind internet stranger! That was bugging me so much :)

That's a good point. I can totally see how as a kid I would have tried to mess with self driving cars.

We messed with human-driven cars to great amusement (to us) when we were teens.

Abruptly stepping in front of a vehicle is basically already illegal in the US. So no need to pass laws, except maybe to clarify the use of recordings from the vehicles as evidence.

Of course that won't stop the behavior completely but it won't be a free for all either.

Anti-pedestrian is a curious way of describing a rule that demands basic social cooperation. Are stop signs, red lights, and crosswalks “anti-car”?

Those traffic control measures are anti-pedestrian because they purely exist because of and in support of automobiles.

A situation with pedestrians only doesn't require those traffic controls.

A situation with motor vehicles only does require them, otherwise there will be an increase in the number of accidents and unacceptable congestion.

The mixture of the two requires them only because of the presence of motor vehicles.

It's very simple, really.

Well, implicitly, I meant to hint that after one or two incidents, the lobby might convince the legislature to swing way too far in the other direction. (A very common tactic. You can't just hand liability from one party to another, not in an area people know and care about.)

Kids already do that against human driven car. It's not a new problem.

Why jump in the way? All you need is a showstopper- a cheap chinese gadget that bounces back lidarlaserlight and radarwaves, ahead of time- thus creating the ilusion of a wall.

Not just kids - it's a perfect way to carjack someone.

carjacking vehicles with constant internet connections and GPS's doesn't strike me as an extremely profitable maneuver.

the whole "car detects obstacle in an untrafficed area, stops, door is opened, passenger gets out, passenger gets back in, changes destination to a place not proximate to anywhere they've ever been before" process also sounds like the sort of thing that would justifiably raise a bit of a red flag. maybe not an automated call to 911, but it should probably dump all records to the cloud and trigger a call from an onstar operator or similar.

Dump to whose cloud? I'm not sure I want my car dumping data about my travels to something not under my control.

Many cars already do, unfortunately.

I think the idea is that they'd stop the car, incapacitate the driver, grab what they can and run like hell.

Besides, if we're talking about this happening in the "bad" parts of town, the car can call 911 and broadcast is position all it likes. There won't be any immediate response.

Finally, people who do this long enough will eventually figure out what to disconnect to allow themselves enough time to do what they want with the car- like today's car thieves do with modern car alarms.

They straight up throw a car in a cube van and drive it off to the chop shop. Not a huge leap to faraday-cage the transport vehicle.. probably acts as one already, come to think of it.

The irony of it all is that traffic signals were introduced to make traffic flow more easily! The primary function of the traffic signal lies not in the red period, but the green. Traffic signals are what lets you blow through intersections with bad visibility at 50 mph, rather thanhave to slow down to 15 and carefully check for cross-traffic.

>I see this here on hacker news with people excited about the notion of doing away with stop lights so that AI traffic can flow easily.

I, too, am a fan of roundabouts.

Haha this is a great example of how North America can use old, tested and proven techniques to make our cities better but instead people are drawn to shiny, fanciful new technologies for a solution instead.

> People are completely ignoring the existence of pedestrians and cyclists.

just because the lights for cars are gone doesn't necessitate that the pedestrian crosswalks and buttons be removed. they might even work more effectively, if they can communicate with all the vehicles in the vicinity.

Much better would be smart traffic lights that allow pedestrians or other roads to cross when there are no cars approaching for n seconds. The number of times I've waited for several minutes at a stop light in the middle of the night...

Really, pedestrians should wait indefinitely until there are no cars coming?

No; "when", not "only when".

You can have it both ways -- add a new light state (or just use flashing red all the time) that self-driving cars can ignore.

All other road users have to stop and the light cycles normally. (and during this specially triggered light cycle, even self-driving cars need to stop)

We could end up with roads dedicated to cars being separated from roads dedicated to pedestrians or cyclists. You could imagine if a city was designed from scratch the vehicles could move around almost in tunnel-like back-alleys, with periodic embarkation points into pedestrianized open plazas and boulevards. If Musk's reduction in cost of tunnelling is more than just a pipe-dream, then you might be able to retrofit something like that into an existing city.

But I agree that if autonomous cars come to pass, there will be a lot of pressure to go down the route you discuss.

This is the future of cities. Doing this would open the door for massive efficiency gains. Within these controlled "back-alleys," you could lay down metallic guides for the cars to glide down (dramatically reduced rolling friction losses), and couple vehicles moving in the same direction (dramatically reduced aerodynamic losses). Eventually you could electrify the whole thing so that cars wouldn't have to carry fuel while in the back-alley network

.

It needs a catchy name though. Back-alley is too harsh. Something that represents our aspirations for the cities of the future. I'm thinking "Metro."

I like that nobody caught on. But yes, that's basically a Metro system. The difference is that a Metro system doesn't allow divergence without transfer and it's a "mass transit" system. Autonomous vehicles provide an opportunity to blend controlled and uncontrolled transit paths, privacy, and the ability to diverge without transfer while increasing traffic efficiency, reducing the dangers of driving, and freeing up commuter time for other activities, just like mass transit.

Hah, yes, I agree!

But with a difference of point to point rather than line-based. Autonomous technology will probably mean a kind of union between private and public transport, and between road and metro rail.

> vehicles could move around almost in tunnel-like back-alleys, with periodic embarkation points into pedestrianized open plazas and boulevards.

Sounds an awful lot like a subway or lite rail system to me. I've never understood the fascination with self-driving cars and what they imply for PT--how is such a system superior to a well designed and maintained train system?

I just find it amusing because autonomous vehicles don't really solve any traffic problems. You still have too many cars on the highway at rush hour. Even if they move better, they won't move as well as a train system would for the same number of people in much less space.

And they would be very limited in their destinations.

Cars can go anywhere.

Where do I find a subway that gives me a private cabin where I can leave my things, and still find them there on the trip back?

Would a private locker at a station, do?

Not really, because then you either have to transfer your belongings from station to station or you have to return to the station with your locker.

I don't really see the difference. You have to return to where your car is parked, too. And you have to transfer your belongings from your car to e.g. your house and so on.

Yeah. Something like that would solve so many problems.

We could really hide the rails underground and at last free the roads again for people to use, like the article says it was in the 1920's. We could reduce automotive accidents to a bare minimum, which btw is the main selling point of self-driving cars, far as I can tell. We could reduce pollution by a factor of 10, probably, which is the much bigger problem that the industry isn't try to sell a solution for - because more cars are not exactly what you'd call a solution to it. We could make our cities places for humans, rather than noisy, dirty, polluting, often deadly machines. But, no. We gotta have more cars. Because you can't stop the march of progress.

It's hard enough to get bike lines built, let alone a separate road system.

How so?

> If certain intersections or sections of road consistently confuse AI drivers, automakers will lobby for ways to change these roadways.

I doubt that attitude will ever catch on. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but it seems to me that there's a healthy suspicion about AI drivers.

So far at least, the attitude taken by, well, everyone, is that AI drivers are untrustworthy until proven trustworthy. If AI drivers can't cope with the various challenges of real driving, then the AI drivers are to blame, not the external factors.

If they work well, AI drivers will be permitted to drive. If they do not, they will not be permitted to drive. At no point will they get to dictate what other road-users may do. Our Ludditism will see to that.

When 80-90% of car driving population have switched over to AI driven cars, the focus of Ludditism probably shifts to something more emerging technology and the great majority of people will just nod their heads in unison with those lobbying automakers.

It is not particularly difficult to imagine the general public swaying even to some opposite extreme, supported by some reasoning like "he probably did something wrong to get killed, the AI cars make very few mistakes."

Interesting points. I suppose that's one possibility, but I'm more of an optimist.

Yup. The first thing I think about wrt to driverless cars being adopted en-masse is how trivially easy it would be to DDoS them.

Literally just stand in front of them and there will be nothing they can do. Once people get used to zero social repercussions (driverless cars will be empty probably 50% of the time en-route to pick someone up or go park themselves by my estimation) I imagine you will see things like certain folks simply crossing streets blindly comfortable in the fact that the cars will stop for them regardless of right of way.

Many will disagree that this will happen, but I think many underestimate the antisocialness of folks when there are no consequences.

Why cant we get automated bicycles and get rid of the humans on bikes?

When are we going to learn and just get rid of the humans?

You mean get rid of the handlebars?

When I think of crimes and AI drivers I always think of people using drugs or making sex in driverless taxis.

And then you remember that as part of the passenger safety case for driverless taxis, there will necessarily be cameras and microphones and the ability to lock the doors and redirect the taxi to the nearest hospital or police station, right?

When we were building the Heathrow Pod[1] -- which is effectively an autonomous taxi system -- this was an objection that people raised all the time. In practice, it took approximately zero instances of bad passenger behaviour for people to catch onto the fact that the interior of an autonomous vehicle that can deliver you non-stop to airport security is really the last place on Earth that you'd want to engage in anti-social behaviour.

1: https://www.heathrow.com/transport-and-directions/heathrow-p...

So it will be illegal to have sex at the back of an autonomously driven car?

Who said anything about illegal? Merely monetised. You'll be able to find the videos at www.lookwhohadsexinthebackofataxi.xxx.[1]

1: This does not reflect the views of any previous, current, or future employers, or indeed of myself when I'm being serious.

Presumably not if you own the car. Sex in public (including in buses, subways, etc.) is already illegal in many areas, and cab-company equivalents would presumably get to set their own rules as they do now.

I cannot imagine mandatory tracking devices, anonymous or not, ever being mandatory in the United States. That would never fly.

This is the same United States where just about everyone already carries a tracking device by choice, where lots of people have installed 24/7 network-connected microphones in their homes, and where everyone believes you need ID to fly. This is the same United States where a common political argument is that of course ID should be required to vote because ID is required for everything else, and citizens should just carry ID. This is the same US where a special police force arrests and detains citizens and forces them to prove that they're actually citizens. It's been a long while since we actually objected to the "papers, please" world.

After all, these beacons are not mandatory - they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. If you don't, you can drive your car like any real (read: non-poor) American, or use a taxi or bus. Pedestrians already aren't permitted on highways, what's so different about restricting pedestrians on surface streets?

And if you don't carry the beacon, that's not illegal, it's just your fault if you get hit by a car. It's not the government forcing you to carry it, it's algorithms and corporations, which makes it okay, right? If these beacons are produced by the free market, why should government regulation step in and stifle innovation?

I'm going to assume this is a good-faith argument and not a "bury them in BS" reply:

> This is the same United States where just about everyone already carries a tracking device by choice.

Sure, that's a very reasonable counter-point, however not everyone does.

> where lots of people have installed 24/7 network-connected microphones in their homes

Plenty of folks find asking a wiretap for pancake recipes fine, and there are plenty that balk at the thought. This Christmas my sister bought everyone Amazon's cute little NSA Listening Post™ - was fun how quickly the look of disgust crossed their face when I explained that every conversation would be recorded and store in Amazon's data centers... and probably a few three-letter agencies.

> and where everyone believes you need ID to fly. This is the same United States where a common political argument is that of course ID should be required to vote because ID is required for everything else, and citizens should just carry ID. This is the same US where a special police force arrests and detains citizens and forces them to prove that they're actually citizens. It's been a long while since we actually objected to the "papers, please" world.

There is an insanely large leap between having an ID for a few specific purposes and being mandated to carry a homing beacon.

> they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist.

The post I replied to did not state "to use the roads" - it stated general use of mandatory beacons. You're moving the goalposts.

> And if you don't carry the beacon, that's not illegal, it's just your fault if you get hit by a car. It's not the government forcing you to carry it, it's algorithms and corporations, which makes it okay, right? If these beacons are produced by the free market, why should government regulation step in and stifle innovation?

If the AppleMobile hits me because I don't carry an iPhone, you can best believe they will be sued into oblivion. Remember, this is litigious America!

The Evangelical community would surely denounce a mandatory tracking device as the work of the Antichrist, and I would love to watch politicians shit on that high-turnout demographic.

> The post I replied to did not state "to use the roads" - it stated general use of mandatory beacons. You're moving the goalposts.

Sorry - my reading was that it was in reply to "Worst case scenario, beacons become mandatory. Cheap and anonymous beacons you have to carry when you're near a road," and so I thought you meant "beacons that are mandatory if you're near a road and don't want to be hit." If you mean "beacons that are mandatory just to be a human in America at all," then sure, I think that's going to be a much harder sell, but I'd also argue that the post you were responding to doesn't require such beacons.

I suppose this all hinges on what "near roads" means.

To me, that includes pedestrians walking on a city sidewalk who might jaywalk as the TFA that started this whole conversation is talking about. Now the only way you can ensure folks have that device is to mandate for everyone. Of course in the US it isn't nearly as common, but I know plenty of city-dwellers without cars. IANAL but I'm having a hard time believing a mandatory beacon would pass Constitutional muster, let alone public support.

Again, it doesn't have to be mandatory from the government. It's just that the car companies guarantee they won't hit you if you have a beacon (i.e., they take on all liability), and they make no such guarantee if you don't (i.e., you or your bereaved family have to go fight them in court, have fun). They will have complicated spreadsheets internally calculating the "acceptable" level of casualties, where they can keep the public convinced that it's their fault for not carrying beacons, and not invest in improving their detection algorithms beyond that. (Engineers working for these companies will earnestly try to build the best algorithms they can, but senior management won't staff or fund these departments any more than necessary.)

I'm curious if you were around and leading a normal adult life before 9/11?

I think you'll find "land of the free, home of the brave" is more or less a cheap slogan once the chips are down and people are afraid.

Exceedingly few people in the US actually care about individual freedom or privacy. 9/11 drove that point severely home to me - those born in the 90's and later will never know the America I once knew, and I'm sure those born before Pearl Harbor and the like would say similar.

The erosion of personal freedom and the expectation of privacy just in my lifetime has been absolutely astounding. Watching basically everyone trade their freedom for temporary security.

Hyperbolic? A bit. But I think if you spend some moments of reflection you'll realize almost none of your fellow citizens actually care. They will play lip service at best until an event happens that scares them, and at that point you're the crazy privacy freak with obviously something to hide.

> every conversation would be recorded and store in Amazon's data centers

I agree with everything else you wrote (I think?), but I thought that the Echo only transmitted things it recognized directly following the activation phrase?

I might have exaggerated / misspoken in saying that, but at the same time it hinges on you trusting that the manufacturer is A) telling the truth and B) that device has not been compromised. It is fair to say that it is always listening. Also possible, is that a device positioned in the kitchen helping being used to lookup a recipe could overhear a sensitive conversation in an adjacent room.

I would bet that the Echo and devices like it are amongst the most monitored consumer devices in existence. Plenty of people either already have enough network monitoring to catch it misbehaving, or will install that monitoring just for the sake of catching it. In a weird sense it's like open source software in that regard. I haven't read all the code myself, I really on group knowledge to reassure me. Same for Echo. As a practical matter the Echo and other similar devices are difficult to turn into full-time listen-and-record devices unnoticed.

> As a practical matter the Echo and other similar devices are difficult to turn into full-time listen-and-record devices unnoticed.

Why would it be harder to pwn than anything else?

I think the GP meant that it's harder for _the vendor_ to do it, because there are assuredly many privacy-attuned nerds who would run wireshark a bunch on it and notice when the $ListeningPost becomes an always-on bug.

I don't think they meant to imply that it would be hard to to cause such behavior via malicious action by 3rd parties.

>I'm going to assume this is a good-faith argument and not a "bury them in BS" reply

That reads so snarkily. You announce that what the other guy wrote sounds like a lot of BS, or you strongly suspect it is (why mention that otherwise) but you will very generously act as though it's not. It's good to assume good faith, not so good to announce it like that.

> After all, these beacons not mandatory - they're only needed if you want to use the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. If you don't, you can drive your car like any real (read: non-poor) American, or use a taxi or bus.

You just wrote two things:

1) Pedestrians and bike riders should wear beacons or aren't "real Americans".

2) Poor Americans aren't "real Americans".

Are those what you meant to write?

Yes, that's what I meant to write. Note that those are not my personal opinions (as a pedestrian, cyclist, and non-car-owner, I'd like to think I'm as real an American as anyone else), but I do think they are common opinions in America.

Everybody misinterpreted what I've intended. SHORT RANGE BEACONS. Enough to be "seen" by car AI through obstacles. Here's the imaginary conversation between car and beacon:

- "Is someone behind that parked van?"

- "Yes"

- "Who?"

- "Mind your own business, just slow down in case I decide to jump to the road, ok?"

If the beacons don't identify their carrier, you could very easily troll AI cars by leaving unmanned beacons lying around.

Good point... Well, that seems easy to police: Have one car patrolling for beacons not attached to what appears to be a person or bike. The only consequence of such troll beacons are cars slowing down on that point, that's all.

While I agree, car manufacturers are already monitoring and storing this data. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/01/1...) If the find they can sell it, they will.

Would a beacon have to be a personally associated tracking device? I can imagine carrying a device that just broadcasts a generic "cyclist here, moving this speed and direction" signal, without identifying or being registered to me (bought with cash)

Maybe not mandatory but otherwise you’re liable so your insurance company requires it.

Insurance companies mandating pedestrians carry a beacon? That's even less likely.

They don't need to mandate it, at least not at first. They can just incentivize it the right way and people will willingly jump on board.

"Install this app on your phone to make traffic lights recognize you when you approach them, for a timely shift to green light"

"Install this app to collect pedestrian-points, exchange points for prices and discounts!"

"Get a better insurance tier for installing this app which tracks your fitness. Do your daily 10.000 steps for a free <whatever>!"

Once enough people jump on board, and it's generally accepted as being "normal because everybody uses it", then you can mandate it and the few people left who resist can easily be branded as "paranoid tinfoil-hat people" to marginalize their opposition.

If you're relying on a smartphone to host a beacon, isn't that already a solved problem?

Smartphones are radio transceivers, I would imagine any anonymous beacon technology wouldn't be noticeably louder than what smartphones are already emitting.

Several states already have laws preventing that requirement. In those states, location-tracking must be opt-in, and must offer an economic benefit to the policyholder.

Any insurer which raises rates to pay for this would quickly lose most of its business unless they're (a) the only insurer in the state or (b) convince the rest of the insurers in-state to collude on pricing. The first isn't the case of any state with respect to auto insurance, and the second is a state and federal felony punishable by many years in jail for any executive stupid enough to participate.

And that's assuming they can get away with the rate increases in the first place. States like CA have insurance commissioners empowered to review and reject rate increases.

You do know that progressive has been doing it for a few years, right? With that little device that you can plug into your car to lower the rates?