Originally published at: Car-free activists disabling self-driving cars with traffic cones in San Francisco | Boing Boing
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Yay, say the cyclists!
Some old ways really are better.
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“Let’s add more chaos to already jammed up streets” says Waymo. “What could it hurt, and what could possibly go wrong?” And why would anyone care; corporations are people, too! "
In my head this is said in a Pooh voice, but I don’t even know why.
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I hear it in the voice of my inner Eeyore.
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Here it is, the start of the war against the machines.
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Take it up a notch.
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“Vandalism”, they call it, in a desperate attempt to distract SF residents from the fact that the self-driving vehicles being beta tested on their streets can be so easily fooled.
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Ahahaha, this is amazing. I love that this hack works.
Carry on, car-free activists. Carry on.
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I followed way too many of those social media links and didn’t find anything explaining why this works. Does it block a camera or sensor that disables it?
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I imagine they are trained to avoid cones, and one sitting centered in front of the sensors on the roof tricks it into thinking it cannot move forward. I would think this would cause the car to attempt to go around but maybe after it tries and is unable it shuts off instead of driving in reverse or going endlessly in circles which would be undesirable.
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Part of what makes it good is that if the car drove right over the cone they could call that a problem too. Don’t want the cars just driving over cones placed by road workers either. They’re just not making the software with sufficiently advanced reasoning for it to be a good idea.
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Truly, if someone sent dubiously controlled robots into the world that could block emergency vehicles or possibly crush a pedestrian under it’s wheels, I’d think being charged with “vandalism” would be letting them off easy.
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It knows it doesn’t have room to do that so it simply stops. The fallback of any situation it can’t grapple with is to stop, reasoning that that is likely the safest thing to do (mostly, though not always a good assumption)
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Once again, for people in the back: Self-driving cars do not exist yet!
Putting this faulty, barely-functioning technology on the streets is putting everyone’s lives at risk, and should absolutely be illegal. They’re lucky people are just sticking traffic cones on them and not smashing them to bits with crowbars as a public service.
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(fixed that for you)
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Honestly, the way it’s going, I feel like they’re setting things back decades with their cavalier embrace of not-ready-for-prime time tech. I think, at a minimum that any level of autonomy should require a transponder that communicates with other cars and periodic government waypoints things like exact position, velocity, location and velocity of other vehicles, unexpected obstacles, etc. If autonomous cars were sort of daisy-chained to each other in a specialty lane like HOV, I’d bet they would move more safely and efficiently than what is now basically an extension of American driving ethos; fuck you and fuck your safety as long as I can get there faster and insurance covers my fuckups.
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Screw you, Johnny Cab!
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Yah, if only there was sort of transportation system where the cars all moved together in a highly efficient and coordinated manner, as though they were connected and on rails. 
Snark aside, they have done studies on that for cars and determined that road capacity would double or triple if all the cars were connected in some sort of cruise-control network where they all followed closely together automatically. The compression spring effect of traffic actually costs enormous efficiency. Way more than you’d expect. It’s really interesting.
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Human technology can be easily defeated!
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