Motorola patents a robocop autonomous car that brethalyzes, mirandizes you, calls your lawyer and collects your bail

See my post above.
What’re you going to do, ask it why?

Given the separate histories of 1) people who are very unwilling to be taken into custody and either destroy or hijack police vehicles and 2) people who are very willing to vandalize or destroy independent robotic machines, I don’t see a positive outcome for this endeavor.

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Why’s that scary? Perhaps people wouldn’t fucking speed if they thought they’d get caught. Clearly putting up signs isn’t enough to actually help sort one of the main risk factors associated with one of the main causes of accidental deaths in the west.

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Not to mention making life very shitty for everyone who isn’t in a car. Frankly, driving should be much more heavily regulated. You want to be free to break the rules, ride a bike where the energies are miniscule in comparison to a motor vehicle.

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I think you already have your answer snark snark snark

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Miranda relegated to a machine that, presumably, can’t tell if you are paying attention, or perhaps even being beaten or unconscious.
And… will take bail on the spot from those who can afford it.

I don’t right understand the perspective of the people developing this thing.

I’ve been hauled in by cops, and it’s demoralizing as fuck… still, this sounds worse.

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One of the best use cases for self driving cars is to get drunk people home from bars safely. I think having your car rat you out when you want to use it in autonomous mode is a bad idea and will keep people from using them, costing lives.

And… just remember, seat belts are a privilege.

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Verdict: GUILTY!

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It would. But everything covered in the patent is for the police car. It’s still pretty weird. I guess the idea is, the cop pulls you over, finds out you’re drunk, and calls for a car to take you to jail (or not) so the cop can continue working at that location. I don’t know why it needs to give another breath test nor do all the processing in the vehicle, though. Or why, in a world with fully autonomous vehicles, the passenger would be driving themselves, drunk, in the first place.

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There’s already a grace zone of 5-10 mph when using speed detector equipment because speedometers are inaccurate. I can only imagine that any such GPS based system would need an even larger grace zone. GPS speed estimation is probably significantly less accurate than traditional speed detector equipment, and the average speedometer is still not particularly accurate.

  1. How can you get a patent for what is basically just an algamation of existing technologies?

  2. I have a good idea, I think, for a police car design. It would be more of a station wagon - the old school kind where you can get in the back. Have a separate section for people in the back that can more easily fit someone back there and buckle them up. Also hose it out for drunks who puke. The section where the passengers usually set would have drawers accessible from the outisde for things like stop sticks, cones, flares, med kits, rifle/shotgun kits, donuts, etc.

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It’s just one more thing that’ll squeeze out more poor people, by squeezing them for more money.
In the developed world, mining people is the last big market.

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  1. Almost all patents are built on existing patents, what is patented is the process and/or arrangement of devices for a novel purpose.
  • A fairly good example of this is portrayed in the film “Flash of Genius” about Robert Kearns and his patent for the intermittent wiper system where Ford, who he had attempted to license or sell his patent to, rejected his offer only to implement the exact design a few years later. Their legal argument came down to, there’s nothing new, it’s just a clever arrangement of existing patents. Kearns, then took the stand and read the opening of a Tale of Two Cities explaining that every word in that opening had been used before, but it was the novel arrangement of existing words that made the book unique.

Granted, that’s copyright, but the idea is mostly the same for patents, which is important because the purpose of a patent is two fold, to provide security for a limited number of years for the inventor so that they may benefit from their invention, but also to add the invention to a public database so that further work can be built upon it. Almost any piece of electronics you can point to is built on an amalgam of existing technologies put together in a novel arrangement.

The difficulty with this patent’ the Motorola one’ is that it seems rather vague, granted I haven’t read the actual patent filing, and I probably won’t, because they are written in simultaneous Legalese and Engineering Jargon to be both as clear as possible as to what they’re claiming the rights to, and as vague as possible in regards to how to achieve it. What’s given looks like a summary and a basic diagram of the general layout.

Now for years there are some who have been trying to pass a ‘working model’ clause to the patent system where you would need to show that the novel arrangement actually functions, but there has been resistance to this idea because 1: this would, for process patents, involve taking someone into the plant from the patent office and showing them the actual process, which could pose a risk to ‘trade secrets’ and would rely a lot on the intellectual capabilities of the representative. 2: the perception that this would hurt the guy in the garage who has a great idea, but can’t actually build it due to expense; it certainly scared me that way.

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Two, actually. For simplicity, I’m assuming no one would willingly freely choose such a car unless they were required to do so. This would most likely mean everyone would be required to do so.

One, because such a system is needlessly punitive for no benefit. A better solution, if a car is capable of determining when it is speeding, is to automatically prevent it from doing so. Or, since there are sometimes times where speeding is safer than not, at least allow the driver to explain why they did so after the fact to avoid the ticket.

Two, as a general matter, I do not want to live in a world where laws are enforced ruthlessly and consistently without human oversight. There are a few types of laws where this can be a good thing, but most laws aren’t (and can’t be) written precisely enough for that to be a good idea.

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Ah, I missed that, thanks!

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Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when cop cars with military surplus automated turrets get patched to firmware v1C077005_20280229 and stop gunning down random citizens and they come for you?

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In this case you can turn to USPTO Patent Application Information Retrieval and see the details of how they argued their case. Search for the patent number, click the “Image File Wrapper” tab, and then select “Applicant Arguments/Remarks Made in an Amendment”. It’s vaguely readable.

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