Just imagine people accustomed to highly assisted driving in a metropolitan area suddenly forced to take over when two cars cannot manage to pass each other on such roads.
So I liked to watch "There's no such thing as a Self Driving Car - A MOTOMANTV RANT" by a car journalist here: https://youtu.be/8NJQCyv6BSk
Whether they can feasibly scale out to many other cities in an economic fashion is still unknown, but on a technical level they're definitely possible, because we already have them.
And yeah, cities and countries vary in difficulty, though as far as the US goes, SF is quite technically challenging in terms of urban obstacles (though the weather is of course quite mild).
And when I see how most modern cars handle signs like a speed limit to e.g. 30km/h with both additional texts like "from 9-15” and additionally on "monday-friday" or limited "for 300m" I always shake my head.
We have some interesting experiments (Cruise, Waymo) wandering around (a subset of) our streets, but they simply can't drive nearly as well as 98% of humans.
They achieve some measure of "safety" by failing safe e.g. stopping and putting hazard flashers on when confused. But they're not an effective or useful "service" for us, in the current state. Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing?
If you can agree that in 1000 years, it's extremely likely that we'll have self-driving cars, then to paraphrase Churchill, now we're just haggling over timeline. 500 years from now, will we have self-driving cars? 500 years ago, gunpowder and windmills were new technology. How about 200 years? The big thing was steam power then.
And so forth and so on. Unless there is some natural or physical law that would prevent self-driving cars, it's just a matter of when. And honestly, if you watch some of these Tesla FSD drives that people post on Twitter, it's pretty clear that self-driving is production-ready under a significant number of circumstances.
The problem is, of course, that there are a lot of edge cases, and because the stakes are high, we have to solve most of those to get true full self driving. But given that cars can pretty reliably traverse the streets of SF, I struggle to see the argument that the remaining edge cases are impossible to solve.
Ignoring the questions of if there will even be people -- let alone cars as we known them -- in 1,000 years, my answer to this is:
I have no idea. I don't see any special reason to suspect that such cars will exist in 1,000 years. I also see no special reason to suspect that they won't.
> If you can agree that in 1000 years
We don't agree on this.
This will be the best of both worlds because we’ll still be able to drive when we want or need to (on roads where it’s allowed), and free to be driven when we prefer that, and the existing fleet of cars can age safely, preserving that investment for its useful lifetime.
It took a bit longer than a human driver would, but it made it through. I should have videoed it because I thought for certain it would get stuck.
My biggest complaint with Waymo's driving was it sometimes didn't plan ahead to be in the correct lane for a turn coming up within a few blocks and then couldn't get over due to aggro drivers. They seem to have addressed this though
The most impressive feat was when it went down a narrow road to find it was blocked. It managed a 3-point turn in a difficult situation and found another route.
The biggest "bug" I witnessed was a situation with only one road going to the destination and that road was closed with a police road block. It turned around and then kept coming back to the road block, basically looping forever. Had to have an engineer intervene.
If Waymo can handle SF roads, I think it can handle anything in the US (at least without deep snow on the roads). Dunno about other places where you might have to get "creative" with your driving.
How does one tell the robot car to pull over, I'm done and getting out here? Can you open the door and jump out if need be?
[citation needed]
This is a very dubious statement and it really sounds like you have never driven a car or anything larger.
I was frightened, but impressed. (Good thing nobody opened the door.)
re: 1.5 car width lanes or trails or whatever
Have you seen humans drive in other countries? Italy, India and Boston (lol - many more) have driving situations where lane lines are not obeyed and cars pack pretty tightly on a regular basis. I cannot imagine a world where that is not solved.
The issue are the millions of edge cases in which humans remain far better at analyzing, figuring out a solution, and compromising in.
Here's an example of a non-autonomous car backing up for a FSD Tesla: (at 22:20) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6KLC3S5gc&t=22m14s
FSD Beta handles this now, including the negotiation of which car passes first
I soon will be on holiday in rural France again and you might not believe who and what is driving on those small roads. Which is totally OK with me, but I highly doubt tech will handle that in the near future.
(This is separate from this footage eventually being used to sell ads, as well as it being used non-consensually to "investigate" other crimes. I think Schneier is right to highlight concerns around the latter.)
We’re already down a dangerous path that isn’t really slowing down. Privacy in the digital age needs to be akin to no unlawful search and seizure.
But instead the ones at the top have us bickering against each other about more mundane issues, in the grand scheme of things
It's interesting they could have the most up to date mapping of anyone, I wonder if they plan to do anything with it.
No worries, Amazon has an excellent reputation, they would not think of doing shady things for money.
That doesn’t have to mean “government cameras”; I’m open to any solution that achieves those goals, including stricter licensing, urban redesign, harsher fines, etc.
There are many of those, in many formats, with many different behaviors. I'm not sure what lack of surveillance the OP is talking about.
But there does exist a high reluctance of transit rule enforcers to enforce transit rules, together with a high bias into looking only at the rules aimed at protecting the people inside the car, mostly at places where the car is creates the least risk to people outside of it.
In the US, I am astounded at what is commonly accepted now. Not all that long ago, most people would have thought even the level of surveillance that we accept right now was an impossibly orwellian thing that would never have been accepted.
Yet here we are. I even see people arguing regularly here on HN that these are good things, when just 30 or so years ago, these would have been things that we would have rioted to prevent.
I have come to think that there is no amount of oppression that Americans can't be convinced into.
e.g. https://www.onstar.com/services/stolen-vehicle-assistance
Either way, new cars will factually not have kill switches by 2026 because nothing will be defined until then. How long after is an unknown.
Edit: I made an error with my dates. Lawmakers have until Dec 2024 to make the rules. The earliest a manufacturer can enact the rule is after Dec 2026. But lawmakers can also extend the dates and also have until Dec 2031 to submit barriers and reasons why the system may not work.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684... SEC. 24220. ADVANCED IMPAIRED DRIVING TECHNOLOGY.
And yes, it's prone to all kinds of abuse by all kinds of "interest groups" …
And it never really does.
Obviously I want nobody hurt. But the boomer and silent generation house and senate have, lets just say, tech comprehension problems. I think a 10 minute demonstration to this issue is enough to get them to reconsider that their ideas are utter shit. Especially so if something inconveniences or otherwise annoys them :)
Or remotely nerf your car if you miss a few payments?
It won't matter if you participate or not - the sensors are a miasma that surround you, and your behavior will be captured and inferred anyway.
The world of Enemy of the State (prescient film) is real [1].
Just wait until we get DNA sensors that capture the air and endothelial cells you exhale [2]. Those are coming too. Perhaps a lot like the ones in GATTACA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/airborne...
I mean if everyone starts riding bikes they’ll just apply the same tech anyway.
There’s no winning this arms race, the only protection is going to be laws so we should really be putting much more care into laws, the people who make them, and the systems that put or remove them from power.
Because of this, bicycles played a significant role in women’s liberation movements.
https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/pedaling-path-freedom
That’s horrifying if so.
In the USA this change to electric parking brakes was hastened by most people just not using the parking brake at all, instead just putting the car into "park" on the transmission. Many experienced drivers I know in USA do not know what a parking brake is or how to use it.
It was? Who decided this? It wasn't SAE.
though with electric brakes there's no longer a long wire cable that can break (happens in the rust belt)
Also, pulling the electronic-brake in an emergency won't lock the back wheels like a handbrake can. The car will come to a controlled stop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile_(Black_Mirror)
> an insurance investigator who uses a "Recaller" to view his memories, as best as he can picture them, on a screen
It is nice mind experiment that cars could theoretically spy on everyone, but hitting some practical problems, like who is paying for traffic from a car to some datacenter which will be in high megabytes every second? Who pays for petabytes of data to store every hour? Who pays for massive server clusters to search through those data when you need them?
For development prototypes, sure. For real production pieces it is unlikely to store that much data if any, because storage is expense and expense is lower margin and margin is thin.
My Toyota has an optional subscription to allow its data connection to be used for roadside assistance services, but the connection is always there regardless (and is used by Toyota to push updates to the car's touchscreen software without me paying for any subscription).
Frankly with higher interest rates and reduced investment, it’s easier to imagine research being scaled back than true self driving cars becoming generally available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driver-less_train_syst...
What if government agencies and oligarchies benefit form that stalking, too?
(replying to what you didn't say) Extend the existing dumb automatic copyright to our personal data so that buyers/sellers have to pay royalties.
Have you seen the terms of service for social media sites? There's a clause in there that grants them a non-exclusive transferable irrecoverable royalty-free license to whatever you post on the site. What makes you think that companies won't add the same clause for your personal data?
> And it’s easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.
And both of those are much easier than identifying you and reaching out to you in order to pull the recordings off of your Subaru.
Alternatively, a hacker can kidnap you. :D
Or make your car stop on the freeway [1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
Whatever your opinion of him, Snowden never would have made it out of the country. His own car would have detained him.
[1] https://www.reviewgeek.com/111381/you-dont-really-ever-own-a...
[2] The Hated One Your Car Is a Better Spy than Facebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX2SWUMt_fk
[3] https://hothardware.com/news/bidens-infrastructure-bill-mand...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/26/tesla-dat...
[5] https://doubleagent.net/2023/05/21/a-car-battery-monitor-tra...
[6] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
What else needs to be uncloaked as surveillance technology before people stop trusting big tech?
Stay inside.
