Originally published at: A cop pulls over a car, only to find it empty. The deviant car then takes off before the cop is finished (video) | Boing Boing
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The rest of the story:
So, if you are a Cruise vehicle, the cops are “trained” to phone home for you.
Would that People of Color had that option, that police had such training for that.
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It’s insane that the government would even consider allowing these on public roads without giving the cops an easy way to disable them. A physical kill switch (or probably several, mounted on the corners of the vehicle) along with a simple wireless kill device where the cops can dial up a code or something.
This is a huge piece of machinery weighing thousands of pounds. There absolutely needs to be a way to ensure it’s in some sort of safe mode if you need to approach it. The lawmakers and regulators who are allowing this shit need to do their damn jobs.
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Strangely satisfying.
@Otherbrother The ACAB’s can shoot the tires out, deploy road spikes, etc etc etc.
[note sarcasm]
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Good thing it’s white.
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Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity, and win for once.
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It makes sense a cop should be able to disable it for some reason, but that also sounds like a dangerous back door.
For example I’m thinking about all those unmarked cop car impersonators we read about. If the driverless car stops because it sees the emergency lights, now the passengers are stuck.
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Either the software running the vehicle is good enough for the vehicle to operate safely, or it’s not. If it’s not then it should not be unattended on the road at all. Adding a physical externally accessible kill switch is also adding new points of failure that could result in an unsafe failure mode.
If the physical kill switch is a hard shutdown then you have added the risk that rocks or debris could trigger an uncontrolled shutdown at speed with passengers present. Risking them, other motorists, and potentially leaving a large abandoned vehicle in traffic.
If it is a software switch that just tells the vehicle to pull over or stay pulled over then you have added little that was not already demonstrated, it does already pull over in the presence of police officers.
The we can get into all the malicious uses of a kill switch that is externally accessible. From someone just killing the vehicles because they can, to griefing people by disabling the vehicle after they have entered the it.
At the end of the day the only way for a driverless vehicle to ‘fail safe’ is for it’s software to be correct and include a safe mode. If that is the case then the switch would just be a software signal. If the switch is just a software signal and the software is not correct then the switch is likely to put officers and the public more at risk because it provides a false sense of security and new ways to fail unsafe.
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When questioned, the driver of the cab was uncooperative and had to be forcibly removed from the vehicle.
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What do you mean? You would have prevented the exact scenario that this video demonstrated: the car moved away from the cop unexpectedly and there was no way for the cop to stop it. If you’re going to approach and put hands on a machine like this, as the cop did, you need to have assurance that it won’t do something unexpected.
My job involves working with a fleet of passenger-carrying semi autonomous vehicles. But they aren’t on public roads and there are several redundant systems in place to ensure that a person can’t approach them without a high degree of certainty about what it will or will not do.
Yes, but that’s really no different from the many other ways that malicious folks can (and probably occasionally will) mess with self-driving cars by kicking the front bumpers to trigger a stop (those bumpers damn well better have sensors, by the way) or throwing crap on the cameras. Just because people sometimes mess with fail-safe systems for fun doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be required to have the systems fail safe.
Also:
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Yeah even if they could design an AI that never, ever violated traffic laws there are still plenty of scenarios in which a cop or emergency worker might need to stop and access a driverless vehicle. For example if there was a passenger inside suffering a medical emergency.
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How did the cop not know there were driverless cars? A massive failure by the police that these were allowed on the street without being fully sure all cops knew about them. Their introduction must have been planned for a long time so there’s no excuse.
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I wonder if there are internal cameras or audio? If he really didn’t know I bet it was a double-take for the ages.
“License and registration pl… a-wha a-wha a-whaaaaAAAAAA?!”
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To be fair, the number of things that cops don’t know (or, often, just ignore) that are relevant to their jobs and they absolutely should know (e.g. the law) is pretty staggering. It doesn’t surprise me that they would be ignorant of this, even if the police departments were explicitly told this was going on.
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Or a massive failure by whichever regulators failed to notify the police about them.
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Did the cop get out of the back seat of the police car at the beginning of the video?
Not if it’s a kofta delivery!
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Yeah, there are so many scenarios how this could happen - e.g. the laws were written such that companies don’t need to explicitly inform the cops (and the cops simply aren’t paying attention to these developments, even though they should have been), or the police were explicitly informed (that there was a protocol for dealing with this suggests that’s the case), but that information either didn’t get disseminated down to the level of patrol cops, or at some point down the chain of command people didn’t pay attention to the information. (Because these are so new, I could see the police bureaucracy being slow to respond and could believe that information is still making its way through the system.)
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