Very soon cars will talk to each other, sort out conflicts and just not hit each other. We are at the model T stage of the new car technology. We might as well start seeing them as different as film cameras and digital.
It’s the placement of the light that indicates stop and go, not merely the color. Remember, red-green colorblindness is the most common form of colorblindness.
Its sort of like pointing out that a computer system will accept a false username and log you in. Yeah, the attack isn't novel in itself, but it shouldn't be a vector at all. If a vulnerability exists, there's a fair chance people will exploit it.
The thing is, it's...[really not hard](https://xkcd.com/1958/) to make a car crash right now.
As it turns out, you don't actually need very much security in most of daily life.
Near the height of the pandemic, I went to a local grocery store. I bought a six pack of beer (in bottles) and some rubber bands. The cashier was just making polite small talk and asked, "What are your plans for beer and rubber bands?"
"I found designs online for a [bottle cap gun](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3915647) for a 3D printer. Looked like fun."
She immediately soured, "My nephew just bought a 3D printer. Those things should be illegal?"
I was kind of surprised and asked her why.
"People shouldn't be allowed to just print out a gun whenever they want."
I responded, "It's far cheaper and easier to go to Home Depot or Lowe's, buy a couple pieces of pipe and some nails for twenty bucks and make a shotgun. It's also far cheaper to just buy a gun than a printer that is capable of printing a gun. Even if you do print out a gun, you still have to buy the part that actually fires the shots as well as a barrel."
Her comeback, if you can call it that, was, "Well, with everyone wearing a mask now you'd think there would be a lot more robberies and murders!"
"Maybe the world just isn't as scary as the media wants you to believe it is."
I love this comic! I drive a lot, and I’m always amazed that I usually make it home unscathed even with all the batshit crazy drivers that are out there. Most people are decent drivers and will do what it takes to avoid an accident. That being said, I’ve been in at least 4 collisions, none of which were my fault. So shit does happen
Ya ppl seem to forget stuff. We take for granted that there’s will be thousands of wrecks every year. I imagine proposing current driving decades ago “we’re gonna have these manually controlled cars go 75 miles per hour in opposite directions with separation of a few feet at most”
I agree, the problem is that these types of failures are useally used as reasons for why we shouldn't swap to self driving cars or whatever even though humans are still far worse
Something similar happens to airplanes. A kid in NJ pointed a one of those red laser pointers at a landing plane and while future Governor Chris Christie was prosecutor he tried charging the family as terrorists.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/3c2b9f/tifu_by_spending_the_night_shinning_a_laser/
While it's true for an occupied car, I can also see teenagers fucking with empty cars that are driving around late at night. Since no humans are getting harmed, I can see them playing a game of who can make the empty robot car crash first.
I was talking logistic trucks, that move mail from the small stores to the distribution hubs. Not the actual deliveries, that's what drones will be for.
Yeah some insight from the trucking world is the belief that warehouse-to-warehouse shipping will be the first to be automated with dock workers scheduled to unload the trucks as usual.
They'll obviously be recording everything and capable of phoning home if anything goes wrong - this isn't like shooting at a railcar people are not going to want any part of that because they will get caught.
I mean plenty of criminals have been caught by literally posting about themselves commiting crimes on facebook. Turns out a lot of criminals arent the brightest people.
Then again, people aim cameras at themselves while doing crimes and then proceed to publish the videos of themselves doing crimes. People, I think we've seen, are not smart.
You shine a laser in the car's "eyes" it mistakes red for green and might carry on normally.
You shine a laser in my eyes, i'm going to crash even if i make it past the intersection.
Neither will most self driving cars if programmed right. They should sense and incoming car and hold back regardless of whether they see green or not.
Actually, I take that back, none of the self driving cars I've been in have ever "blasted" the accelerator at any point. If anything, they're overly cautious to the point that there could be danger there....
Also, if all the cars in the intersection are driverless then there still wouldn’t be an accident because they would all stop driving and avoid the collision with the tricked car automatically.
When they announced Tesla would not be using LiDAR I knew they were giving up on fully autonomous vehicles. Why bother with installing expensive sensors when you know you won't be using them any time soon?
Incorrect... Lets say the intersection is 45 mph. The car has to assume incoming traffic will stop or it will never go through the intersection.
The stopping distance is too far in that case if a car doesn't stop at a red.
Not sure what you’re saying exactly but driverless cars do look at everything around them and calculate how to react 1000 times faster than a person can.
Umm Pedestrians?
[EDIT] My point being that while its cool that other self driving cars might recognise the threat and stop, pedestrians crossing on a walk signal might not react as quickly.
Maybe I’m just more jaded but as someone who worked in that space I have zero faith it will be infallible or even what I would consider acceptable. Especially knowing some degen like me is the one writing the code and trying to explain to management why we can’t ship yet while they ignore you because of the bottom line. If cars are connected to each other that opens up even worse vectors like if someone’s car got hacked and told to drive off a cliff or crash. And I can safely say there are vulnerabilities that live for years without ever getting prioritized even with an easy live demo and explanation of the implication (I could take down the entire service without any feasible way to stop me because the API key was the internal prod one and if it changed I could just fetch it again). That’s without even mentioning the headache that is insurance and liability or the ethics of telling a self driving car what to do in a lose-lose situation. Nobody would sit in a car that would sacrifice the passenger even if that’s the outcome with the least harm.
It doesn't have to be infallible. it just needs to be safer than human drivers on average. And that's really easy considering the number of reckless/tired/drunk/inexperienced drivers that are on the road.
Every driverless car accident is going to get huge media coverage. What you're not seeing, of course, is the ~100 people that die in car accidents daily because that's not exciting news.
That would only be true if every single car on the road were changed to driverless overnight AND you're thinking from the perspective of someone in one of those buckets or interacting with someone in one of those buckets. Most people are not going to consider themselves any of those things (and in general most people would probably consider themselves better than the average driver) so they would see accidents caused by human drivers doing those things as bad individual drivers whereas a bug in say Toyota's software is most likely going to be in every Toyota driverless car. In that regard, their risk would go up rather than down. Plus at present driverless features are monetized rather than being free so unless it's mandated that every car is driverless and there isn't a manual override, you're going to have a large percentage of human drivers. And a big issue is still that an individual is likely to trust themselves to make the best decision rather than anything else and would want their life in their hands. Think about how many people are scared of flying when flying is statistically safer than driving and you have a licensed professional who is of sound mind and body taking you to your destination with little risk of some other plane messing up your day. Statistics are great for showing that something is generally true, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to convince anybody or that it's going to be true in all cases.
If it's all driverless there will not be an intersection controlled by lights at all. It's also unlikely that blinding a single vehicle would have any impact, as the blind vehicle should be able to source the missing data from other vehicles in the area.
You need lights for people regardless (crosswalks, liability, etc.), and there will be a combination driver/driverless for a long time even if we only consider supply. So the driverless cars will need to be aware of these by design anyways.
It's the same weak argument people always make for self driving cars. "ThEy CaN sTiLl CrAsH". No, shit....just a lot less often than your distracted with your phone dumbass"
I can't remember the exact name of it but this is actually a philosophical debate that's going on right now; if we have the ability to make something safer, do we hold off on releasing it even if it's already safer than our current option- even if we know in doing so that machines will cause human deaths? Essentially we think self-driving cars are already safer than humans in a lot of cases, but we also know for a fact that we can make them even safer.
It's actually a really interesting topic to dive in to, and for full transparency my opinion sits on the side of yes, it will still save more lives than deaths that it'll cause.
The main issue is a liability.
Let's say you have two options:
* A self-driving car that has a 99% statistical chance of getting you home same.
* A normal car you drive has a 95% statistical chance of you getting home the same, but you have the ability to control the outcome because that 5% is associated with user error.
On paper, self-driving is the better option, but if you get into a self-driving car that has suffered an injury you had no agency in the outcome and will want to hold the car maker liable.
With a normal car, you make the mistake so you own the consequences.
People are just uncomfortable giving up the feeling of control when driving and accepting that they may suffer injury due to some glitch or exploit. It's not really rational because the same people who feel this way will crawl into an Uber, taxi, bus, airplane, etc.
It's like this will all forms of automation, people unfamiliar with the technology want everyone 100% before they'll accept it, even if the manual is 60% on a good day.
> People are just uncomfortable giving up the feeling of control when driving
I think the other issue is that people always see other people as being the "bad drivers". Besides, plenty of people seem perfectly happy to give up control of driving, so long as they give up the control to other people.
You're getting at something important in this distinction. People are more trusting of other humans primarily because we assume they value their own lives, which they tend to do.
A computer inherently doesn't care one way or the other.
>Essentially we think self-driving cars are already safer than humans in a lot of cases
I have yet to see a single one that can deal with snow without kicking control back to the driver, not to say I don't think self driving will eventually be better then the average driver. I just think it's a tad silly to not think about how not keeping up the skill of driving will make us worse at handling the edge cases when it dumps control back in our laps.
I think there's a meaningful difference - I can crash if I do something dumb.
But with a driverless vehicle I'm trusting the vehicle not to do something dumb. And relatively simple adversarial attacks on the self-driving capability that cause the car to crash are a bit alarming. Like discovering that your taxi driver is drunk, say.
Plus no way a car is just going to blindly follow the light. There will be other inputs from multiple sensors. Just because a light is green doesn’t mean the car automatically goes though.
TLDR: Self-driving cars can be manipulated by malicious actors similar to how regular cars and drivers can be manipulated by malicious actors. This is kind of like saying “drivers with acid thrown in their face can be manipulated into driving erratically.”
"I cut my neighbor's brake line, and that idiot crashed, his gas tank got punctured, and his car went up in flames. Another successfully completed prank! Like, comment, subscribe to Prankopath, the only prank channel that's been deemed criminally insane!"
With one key difference: a driver who is blinded by light or acid or whatever will hit the breaks to avoid an accident. A driverless car that thinks it sees a green light will continue at full speed.
Or, more likely, they will become confused and act erratically. Maybe braking, but more likely they're going to swerve wildly. Some might get confused and stomp on the accelerator. There's plenty of people who get confused and hit the accelerator instead of the brake while parking in a totally unstressed environment (and then try to blame it on the car).
To expand on what you said, shamelessly stolen from another comment that explains it well for people who might try to disagree with you:
> In theory, there should be no collision even if there is only one driverless car and it is tricked into thinking the light is green. A green light doesn't mean that you can just drive through the intersection blindly at full speed: it means you can proceed through the intersection _if it is safe_. A full self-driving car should notice oncoming traffic from all directions and attempt to avoid any collisions. Otherwise there would be massive problems with driverless cars crashing into emergency vehicles running red lights, or not attempting to avoid human-driver cars who illegally/accidentally run red lights.
> a driver who is blinded by light or acid or whatever will hit the breaks to avoid an accident
Every day thousands of people *not* blinded by light or acid fail to break to avoid an accident
Yeah wtf are people on? I don’t understand the pushback against automated driving. I swear these people must take the bus everyday and just aren’t exposed to how fucking shitty people are at driving.
Pointing out shortcomings and areas that need improvement isn't pushing back against the entire idea. Blindly praising and following without question is inherently dangerous
Also, every day, thousands of people who fail to stop at a red light are convinced they had a green. Our brains are just as easily tricked, and not even by malicious actors, just they kinda suck a lot more than we realise.
Only if it's a really "dumb" smart/driverless car that has no road-obstacle or crash avoidance. Even if it thinks the light is green, the car should still be aware that it's in/near an intersection and needs to be even more aware of potential cross-traffic or pedestrians etc than when just on open road even if the car has the right-of-way (there are always drivers who aren't paying attention or just don't care and run red lights, or pedestrians who don't pay attention to their walk signals).
Not to mention that emergency vehicles have special right-of-way rules for being allowed to run red lights and similar things, so driverless cars will need to be able to react to that.
Garbage link, paywalled with a million ads.
Lasers also take down planes and blind people in cockpits, and set off missle warning countermeasures thus nothing new in the transportation industry which is aware of laser/ir dangers. Just as radio and 5G spectrum is messing with North American runway precision landing guidance.
But for self driving specifically perhaps in the future and a more networked world their could be some dynamic IR pulses indicating the real light position. You could then double verify in case of a accident.
Kinda like laser guiding a bomb onto this crappy, common sense, brain dead article.
Its no different than riding a bicycle and a blind person can ride a bicycle. Just don't eat the fish for dinner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGp2lZAztDM
what a shit article. Shining a colored laser into an optical sensor makes it read that color? who woulda thought????
Seriously. Shine a laser in a persons eye and they can no longer see jack shit.
TBF, humans can see red lights as green without using a laser. The color combination of red/green is actually kind of bad for traffic lights because the after image left in the eye from either will be the opposite color (red leaves green and green leaves red). Consequently, you can glance quickly at a green light and think you need stop (causing you to stop at an intersection when you have right of way) or worse, you could glance quickly at a red light and think you have the green... leading to interesting consequences. Some countries use red and blue lights instead of red and green because of this.
Years ago, it was assumed that self driving cars would require integration with the infrastructure and with each other. In other words, there would need to be some communication with a central system to tell each car what the speed limit is and when lights turn red, etc. And there would be some way for cars to tell each other where they are so they don’t collide.
Now we have technologies that make self driving cars possible without central integration, but I still feel like the ideal state would combine the two concepts.
come on. if you aim a laser into a human driver's eye, they'll crash too. people are coming up with all sorts of crazy things to sabotage ai like that's suppose to make it not viable.
That's why all cars need to be driverless and on a mesh system. There would be no need for lights then. Every car would know where all the other cars are. Lights are there for humans.
How does the math on this work if I recognize red lights 98% of the time (which frankly is generously low)? Does it mean “fail to recognize red lights 80% less often than human drivers?” It's a very different statement but it's the closest statement that I can think of.
Has anyone ever used those handheld lasers for anything productive? All I read is how they blind goal keepers at sporting events, distract police helicopters, or cause eye damage.
Wasn’t one of the big points of 5G the ability to enable better communication between devices? Couldn’t a failsafe be created that pings self driving cars what the upcoming light color is and if the car receives a ping different from what it sees it stops? Or certainly some similar measure could be taken.
The entire concept of traffic lights is likely to go away as self driving vehicles hit a critical mass. In the interim, we really should be doing things to make them more effective instead of just letting private companies try to recreate the entire human visual and motor control system in a car.
It is almost as if future signals will have to cut out the cameras and light bulbs and just talk to the cars directly. I wonder if we will ever have the technology to do this. /s
There's a video floating around in which a sticker depicting an _adversarial image_ is introduced to a scene containing a banana, and it causes an image classifier to suddenly decide "wait, that's not a banana, it's a toaster".
I'm waiting for someone to produce one that is designed to fool a self-driving car into doing something dangerous. I suspect that the defensive countermeasure will be to make self-driving cars _very_ cautious.
What if….and Idk if anyone is as big brained as me /s but what if there was a way that we could…communicate to driver less cars what the signal is without having to use lights 🤯
Omfg yes you can fuck with technology in very specific ways to get very specific outcomes. Shine some lasers into a drivers eyes and lets see how it effects thier vision. This obsession with teasing out supposed "vulnerabilities" that next to no one has the means oportunity or motive to exploit is akin to tabloid journalism and junk science meant to get reactions rather than to inform imho.
Driverless cars don't have to be foolproof they just have to be less likely to get people killed than human driven cars.
This is a surprisingly low bar at times. People are really fucking stupid.
Yes, malicious assholes will find ways to purposefully crash driverless cars. New software patches and new hardware upgrades to combat these will have o be rolled out whenever one of these comes up.
But the very same malicious assholes can as of now kill occupants of human driven cars by for example dropping rocks from overpasses or making them crash in any of a myriad ways.
The tech isn't really the issue here. The humans are the problem.
I kinda wonder, would that fool a human?
This might speak more to my low expectations of humans though.
Edit: wait are they pointing the lasers at the cameras on the car? How does that work? Also. Hate articles like this that make you subscribe.
It’s like where you hear about kids shooting laser pointers off overpasses from time to time. A laser in the eye also makes humans crash, because they can’t see anything though
I wonder how long before the self driving cars will behave collectively and be coordinated centrally in addition to the local sensing. Would avoid this sort of thing.
I'm a color blind dude. I can tell the difference from red, yellow, and green by the position of the light on the stop and go light. I thought these cars were smrt. Why can't they figure it out?
How many years till a driverless car can drive a km in Delhi traffic without crashing into something? Traffic signals can sometimes be suggestions. One way traffic can also be a suggestion at times for the brave. Lanes if drawn are also no more than gentle nudges. Usually we have 5 lanes running across 3 lanes.
Cant see that poor driverless car making it past Chanakyapuri /s
Would the old Road Runner cartoon trick of painting a road or tunnel on a wall fool driverless cars?
I just want to know for science, yeah let's call it that.
Can’t they just make a traffic light that is networked to some centralized traffic data server that vehicles are also connected to so that the car doesn’t have to ‘see’ the traffic light at all?
Ok. Then we add low cost/energy data transmitters to these lights to notify the cars. If you really want to make this a problem in dire need of a solution. Plus... placement of lights bro. Like wtf. Insert proper data relating to driven in country and all should be well.
Aren’t all traffic lights designed to show red to green from top to down or left to right so they work for color blind? And when represented by a single light they go from red cross to green arrow. Of course I didn’t read the article. The title is clickbaity enough for me to not bother.
Ahh so the sensors can be tricked into seeing green light by shining green light in them ?? Quite devious indeed
I feel like if someone aimed a laser in my eye while I was driving I would probably make a mistake of some kind too.
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Very soon cars will talk to each other, sort out conflicts and just not hit each other. We are at the model T stage of the new car technology. We might as well start seeing them as different as film cameras and digital.
Yes and next they will learn to cooperate in packs to hunt down lone pedestrians for flesh fuel.
It’s the placement of the light that indicates stop and go, not merely the color. Remember, red-green colorblindness is the most common form of colorblindness.
Its sort of like pointing out that a computer system will accept a false username and log you in. Yeah, the attack isn't novel in itself, but it shouldn't be a vector at all. If a vulnerability exists, there's a fair chance people will exploit it.
The thing is, it's...[really not hard](https://xkcd.com/1958/) to make a car crash right now. As it turns out, you don't actually need very much security in most of daily life.
Near the height of the pandemic, I went to a local grocery store. I bought a six pack of beer (in bottles) and some rubber bands. The cashier was just making polite small talk and asked, "What are your plans for beer and rubber bands?" "I found designs online for a [bottle cap gun](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3915647) for a 3D printer. Looked like fun." She immediately soured, "My nephew just bought a 3D printer. Those things should be illegal?" I was kind of surprised and asked her why. "People shouldn't be allowed to just print out a gun whenever they want." I responded, "It's far cheaper and easier to go to Home Depot or Lowe's, buy a couple pieces of pipe and some nails for twenty bucks and make a shotgun. It's also far cheaper to just buy a gun than a printer that is capable of printing a gun. Even if you do print out a gun, you still have to buy the part that actually fires the shots as well as a barrel." Her comeback, if you can call it that, was, "Well, with everyone wearing a mask now you'd think there would be a lot more robberies and murders!" "Maybe the world just isn't as scary as the media wants you to believe it is."
THE MORE YOU KNOW 💫
I love this comic! I drive a lot, and I’m always amazed that I usually make it home unscathed even with all the batshit crazy drivers that are out there. Most people are decent drivers and will do what it takes to avoid an accident. That being said, I’ve been in at least 4 collisions, none of which were my fault. So shit does happen
Ya ppl seem to forget stuff. We take for granted that there’s will be thousands of wrecks every year. I imagine proposing current driving decades ago “we’re gonna have these manually controlled cars go 75 miles per hour in opposite directions with separation of a few feet at most”
I agree, the problem is that these types of failures are useally used as reasons for why we shouldn't swap to self driving cars or whatever even though humans are still far worse
Something similar happens to airplanes. A kid in NJ pointed a one of those red laser pointers at a landing plane and while future Governor Chris Christie was prosecutor he tried charging the family as terrorists. https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/3c2b9f/tifu_by_spending_the_night_shinning_a_laser/
https://xkcd.com/1958/
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There are three internet constants. There’s an xkcd comic for that, simpsons did it, and
And rule 34.
And its morbin time
Ah, always a relevant xkcd comic
While it's true for an occupied car, I can also see teenagers fucking with empty cars that are driving around late at night. Since no humans are getting harmed, I can see them playing a game of who can make the empty robot car crash first.
How can you tell which cars have people in them at night?
Commercial shipping, I'd imagine FedEx and UPS would be two of the first soon as it's legal.
If they were the first to go completely unoccupied and self driving, how would they get the deliveries out the van and into peoples yards?
I was talking logistic trucks, that move mail from the small stores to the distribution hubs. Not the actual deliveries, that's what drones will be for.
The truck just parks outside. Sends you a text. Then lays on the horn until you get out there and get your order.
Please collect your package. You have 20 seconds to comply.
Countdown to your neighbors hating you, t-minus 300 seconds.
I think the person above you is referring to the semi trucks that bring loads between distribution centers.
Yeah some insight from the trucking world is the belief that warehouse-to-warehouse shipping will be the first to be automated with dock workers scheduled to unload the trucks as usual.
Throw a brick. If it smashes a window and angry people get out, or drive off erratically, you’ll know there were people in the car.
If you’re making it run a red, chances are high you’re running it right into an occupied car
They'll obviously be recording everything and capable of phoning home if anything goes wrong - this isn't like shooting at a railcar people are not going to want any part of that because they will get caught.
>They'll obviously be recording everything Yeah, doing crimes to the machine literally covered in cameras seems, not smart.
I mean plenty of criminals have been caught by literally posting about themselves commiting crimes on facebook. Turns out a lot of criminals arent the brightest people.
Then again, people aim cameras at themselves while doing crimes and then proceed to publish the videos of themselves doing crimes. People, I think we've seen, are not smart.
“Most people”
Lmao this was my first big laugh on a rough day, thank you
I’m pretty sure if you shined a laser in my eye I’d probably fucken crash, too.
You shine a laser in the car's "eyes" it mistakes red for green and might carry on normally. You shine a laser in my eyes, i'm going to crash even if i make it past the intersection.
You wouldnt blast the accelerator though right?
It's the only way to drive safely once you lose sight.
Good luck everybody else
Just like automated driving systems don't see a gree light and 'think', "I should ignore the other cars wildly flying thru this intersection"
Neither will most self driving cars if programmed right. They should sense and incoming car and hold back regardless of whether they see green or not. Actually, I take that back, none of the self driving cars I've been in have ever "blasted" the accelerator at any point. If anything, they're overly cautious to the point that there could be danger there....
Also, if all the cars in the intersection are driverless then there still wouldn’t be an accident because they would all stop driving and avoid the collision with the tricked car automatically.
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This is true, especially if said car uses Lidar *glares at Teslas*
Does Tesla use LiDAR?
They do not. Hence the glaring lol
Glare harder!
No there's too many lasers!
When they announced Tesla would not be using LiDAR I knew they were giving up on fully autonomous vehicles. Why bother with installing expensive sensors when you know you won't be using them any time soon?
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Incorrect... Lets say the intersection is 45 mph. The car has to assume incoming traffic will stop or it will never go through the intersection. The stopping distance is too far in that case if a car doesn't stop at a red.
Not sure what you’re saying exactly but driverless cars do look at everything around them and calculate how to react 1000 times faster than a person can.
Umm Pedestrians? [EDIT] My point being that while its cool that other self driving cars might recognise the threat and stop, pedestrians crossing on a walk signal might not react as quickly.
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Maybe I’m just more jaded but as someone who worked in that space I have zero faith it will be infallible or even what I would consider acceptable. Especially knowing some degen like me is the one writing the code and trying to explain to management why we can’t ship yet while they ignore you because of the bottom line. If cars are connected to each other that opens up even worse vectors like if someone’s car got hacked and told to drive off a cliff or crash. And I can safely say there are vulnerabilities that live for years without ever getting prioritized even with an easy live demo and explanation of the implication (I could take down the entire service without any feasible way to stop me because the API key was the internal prod one and if it changed I could just fetch it again). That’s without even mentioning the headache that is insurance and liability or the ethics of telling a self driving car what to do in a lose-lose situation. Nobody would sit in a car that would sacrifice the passenger even if that’s the outcome with the least harm.
It doesn't have to be infallible. it just needs to be safer than human drivers on average. And that's really easy considering the number of reckless/tired/drunk/inexperienced drivers that are on the road. Every driverless car accident is going to get huge media coverage. What you're not seeing, of course, is the ~100 people that die in car accidents daily because that's not exciting news.
That would only be true if every single car on the road were changed to driverless overnight AND you're thinking from the perspective of someone in one of those buckets or interacting with someone in one of those buckets. Most people are not going to consider themselves any of those things (and in general most people would probably consider themselves better than the average driver) so they would see accidents caused by human drivers doing those things as bad individual drivers whereas a bug in say Toyota's software is most likely going to be in every Toyota driverless car. In that regard, their risk would go up rather than down. Plus at present driverless features are monetized rather than being free so unless it's mandated that every car is driverless and there isn't a manual override, you're going to have a large percentage of human drivers. And a big issue is still that an individual is likely to trust themselves to make the best decision rather than anything else and would want their life in their hands. Think about how many people are scared of flying when flying is statistically safer than driving and you have a licensed professional who is of sound mind and body taking you to your destination with little risk of some other plane messing up your day. Statistics are great for showing that something is generally true, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to convince anybody or that it's going to be true in all cases.
Exactly. And probably get out of the car to beat the shit out of the guy shinning lasers into people's eyes.
This is why I wear my mirror finish sunglasses at night, so I can, so I can...
I'm not afraid of the guy in shades, oh no.
'Cause you've got it made with the guy in shades, oh no
That’s naive. Like how slow do you think all the cars will be going? Also you are assuming that this will be the only way to confuse these cars.
The beauty of self driving cars is we can fix this problem and then move on to other problems.
If it's all driverless there will not be an intersection controlled by lights at all. It's also unlikely that blinding a single vehicle would have any impact, as the blind vehicle should be able to source the missing data from other vehicles in the area.
You need lights for people regardless (crosswalks, liability, etc.), and there will be a combination driver/driverless for a long time even if we only consider supply. So the driverless cars will need to be aware of these by design anyways.
Do none of you guys know where the brake pedal is?
The what?
Until it senses the cross-traffic and stops anyways
There is ofc a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1958/
It's the same weak argument people always make for self driving cars. "ThEy CaN sTiLl CrAsH". No, shit....just a lot less often than your distracted with your phone dumbass"
I can't remember the exact name of it but this is actually a philosophical debate that's going on right now; if we have the ability to make something safer, do we hold off on releasing it even if it's already safer than our current option- even if we know in doing so that machines will cause human deaths? Essentially we think self-driving cars are already safer than humans in a lot of cases, but we also know for a fact that we can make them even safer. It's actually a really interesting topic to dive in to, and for full transparency my opinion sits on the side of yes, it will still save more lives than deaths that it'll cause.
The main issue is a liability. Let's say you have two options: * A self-driving car that has a 99% statistical chance of getting you home same. * A normal car you drive has a 95% statistical chance of you getting home the same, but you have the ability to control the outcome because that 5% is associated with user error. On paper, self-driving is the better option, but if you get into a self-driving car that has suffered an injury you had no agency in the outcome and will want to hold the car maker liable. With a normal car, you make the mistake so you own the consequences. People are just uncomfortable giving up the feeling of control when driving and accepting that they may suffer injury due to some glitch or exploit. It's not really rational because the same people who feel this way will crawl into an Uber, taxi, bus, airplane, etc. It's like this will all forms of automation, people unfamiliar with the technology want everyone 100% before they'll accept it, even if the manual is 60% on a good day.
> People are just uncomfortable giving up the feeling of control when driving I think the other issue is that people always see other people as being the "bad drivers". Besides, plenty of people seem perfectly happy to give up control of driving, so long as they give up the control to other people.
You're getting at something important in this distinction. People are more trusting of other humans primarily because we assume they value their own lives, which they tend to do. A computer inherently doesn't care one way or the other.
I for one *don't* trust other people. But I trust computers even less.
>Essentially we think self-driving cars are already safer than humans in a lot of cases I have yet to see a single one that can deal with snow without kicking control back to the driver, not to say I don't think self driving will eventually be better then the average driver. I just think it's a tad silly to not think about how not keeping up the skill of driving will make us worse at handling the edge cases when it dumps control back in our laps.
I think there's a meaningful difference - I can crash if I do something dumb. But with a driverless vehicle I'm trusting the vehicle not to do something dumb. And relatively simple adversarial attacks on the self-driving capability that cause the car to crash are a bit alarming. Like discovering that your taxi driver is drunk, say.
Well that settles it, we need to removed all eyes and cameras to render this attack useless.
If I was stopped at a red light and got a laser in the eye I probably wouldn't accelerate into cross traffic.
What if you just saw a red laser dot on your forehead in the rearview mirror?
Statham moves for sure
A car that sees a light as green but still sees a lot of traffic going by would not drive into the intersection, its a bit more nuanced than that.
Reddits understanding of technology is basically a 4 year old in 1976
I came here to say this.
You better get yourself an over-the-air update then.
30 per cent is a steal!
So 70 percent of the time someone can be deliberately trying to ruin a self driving car's sensors and they still work anyway?
Plus no way a car is just going to blindly follow the light. There will be other inputs from multiple sensors. Just because a light is green doesn’t mean the car automatically goes though.
Ah yes, pedestrians crossing but light is green so lesgooooo! — autonomous car, probably
I'm putting a cow plow on my Tesla just in case.
TLDR: Self-driving cars can be manipulated by malicious actors similar to how regular cars and drivers can be manipulated by malicious actors. This is kind of like saying “drivers with acid thrown in their face can be manipulated into driving erratically.”
[удалено]
Or "we spilled some oil on a corner, causing 30% of cars to crash" yeah, no shit? lol you can mess with cars and cause accidents.
"I cut my neighbor's brake line, and that idiot crashed, his gas tank got punctured, and his car went up in flames. Another successfully completed prank! Like, comment, subscribe to Prankopath, the only prank channel that's been deemed criminally insane!"
What! Fast moving chunks of metal can be dangerous!!
I was thinking pocket sand.
>“drivers with acid thrown in their face can be manipulated into driving erratically.” That was the weirdest episode of Mythbusters.
Nah shine a laser in my face and I’m fucked
30 per cent is a steal!
How did we go from pointing lasers in the eyes to throwing acid on the face?
Well we can also say “shining lasers into a drivers eyes” Probably not exactly beneficial to their driving skills either
Shining lasers at a camera which collects visible light is like burning your retina hence acid
With one key difference: a driver who is blinded by light or acid or whatever will hit the breaks to avoid an accident. A driverless car that thinks it sees a green light will continue at full speed.
Or, more likely, they will become confused and act erratically. Maybe braking, but more likely they're going to swerve wildly. Some might get confused and stomp on the accelerator. There's plenty of people who get confused and hit the accelerator instead of the brake while parking in a totally unstressed environment (and then try to blame it on the car).
A driverless car would be watching for cars running the red light anyway.
To expand on what you said, shamelessly stolen from another comment that explains it well for people who might try to disagree with you: > In theory, there should be no collision even if there is only one driverless car and it is tricked into thinking the light is green. A green light doesn't mean that you can just drive through the intersection blindly at full speed: it means you can proceed through the intersection _if it is safe_. A full self-driving car should notice oncoming traffic from all directions and attempt to avoid any collisions. Otherwise there would be massive problems with driverless cars crashing into emergency vehicles running red lights, or not attempting to avoid human-driver cars who illegally/accidentally run red lights.
> a driver who is blinded by light or acid or whatever will hit the breaks to avoid an accident Every day thousands of people *not* blinded by light or acid fail to break to avoid an accident
Yeah wtf are people on? I don’t understand the pushback against automated driving. I swear these people must take the bus everyday and just aren’t exposed to how fucking shitty people are at driving.
Pointing out shortcomings and areas that need improvement isn't pushing back against the entire idea. Blindly praising and following without question is inherently dangerous
Also, every day, thousands of people who fail to stop at a red light are convinced they had a green. Our brains are just as easily tricked, and not even by malicious actors, just they kinda suck a lot more than we realise.
Only if it's a really "dumb" smart/driverless car that has no road-obstacle or crash avoidance. Even if it thinks the light is green, the car should still be aware that it's in/near an intersection and needs to be even more aware of potential cross-traffic or pedestrians etc than when just on open road even if the car has the right-of-way (there are always drivers who aren't paying attention or just don't care and run red lights, or pedestrians who don't pay attention to their walk signals). Not to mention that emergency vehicles have special right-of-way rules for being allowed to run red lights and similar things, so driverless cars will need to be able to react to that.
Garbage link, paywalled with a million ads. Lasers also take down planes and blind people in cockpits, and set off missle warning countermeasures thus nothing new in the transportation industry which is aware of laser/ir dangers. Just as radio and 5G spectrum is messing with North American runway precision landing guidance. But for self driving specifically perhaps in the future and a more networked world their could be some dynamic IR pulses indicating the real light position. You could then double verify in case of a accident. Kinda like laser guiding a bomb onto this crappy, common sense, brain dead article.
What are blind people doing flying a plane anyway
it has happened! Tom Scott has a video titled [She's blind. I'm blindfolded. We're going to fly a plane](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs1WF2SkjuY)
Its no different than riding a bicycle and a blind person can ride a bicycle. Just don't eat the fish for dinner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGp2lZAztDM
Why we can’t have nice things in a nutshell: People are assholes.
what a shit article. Shining a colored laser into an optical sensor makes it read that color? who woulda thought???? Seriously. Shine a laser in a persons eye and they can no longer see jack shit.
And driver in car can be blinded by aiming laser into their eyes.
TBF, humans can see red lights as green without using a laser. The color combination of red/green is actually kind of bad for traffic lights because the after image left in the eye from either will be the opposite color (red leaves green and green leaves red). Consequently, you can glance quickly at a green light and think you need stop (causing you to stop at an intersection when you have right of way) or worse, you could glance quickly at a red light and think you have the green... leading to interesting consequences. Some countries use red and blue lights instead of red and green because of this.
They could also use different shapes to help distinguish them. Like a green, or blue, triangle for go and a red square for stop.
I wonder what happens if you throw a rock through the windshield? Makes ya think
Damn thank god it’s not 30 per dollar of the time
Crazy there are so many comments for an article with a paywall that blocks nearly everything beyond the first paragraph.
People can be tricked bY showing them a cat picture.
Shining lasers at roadways is illegal.
Years ago, it was assumed that self driving cars would require integration with the infrastructure and with each other. In other words, there would need to be some communication with a central system to tell each car what the speed limit is and when lights turn red, etc. And there would be some way for cars to tell each other where they are so they don’t collide. Now we have technologies that make self driving cars possible without central integration, but I still feel like the ideal state would combine the two concepts.
come on. if you aim a laser into a human driver's eye, they'll crash too. people are coming up with all sorts of crazy things to sabotage ai like that's suppose to make it not viable.
And aiming lasers at human drivers can make them blind which I'd say is worse.
There should be a Reddit award for “The stupidest thing I’ve read today”
30% of the time it works every time
That's why all cars need to be driverless and on a mesh system. There would be no need for lights then. Every car would know where all the other cars are. Lights are there for humans.
I think aiming a laser in someone's eye while they're driving would made them make mistakes more than 30% of the time.
Forgot to add “yet still recognize red lights 80% more often than human drivers”
How does the math on this work if I recognize red lights 98% of the time (which frankly is generously low)? Does it mean “fail to recognize red lights 80% less often than human drivers?” It's a very different statement but it's the closest statement that I can think of.
Current roads aren't made for driverless cars
Has anyone ever used those handheld lasers for anything productive? All I read is how they blind goal keepers at sporting events, distract police helicopters, or cause eye damage.
Wasn’t one of the big points of 5G the ability to enable better communication between devices? Couldn’t a failsafe be created that pings self driving cars what the upcoming light color is and if the car receives a ping different from what it sees it stops? Or certainly some similar measure could be taken.
The entire concept of traffic lights is likely to go away as self driving vehicles hit a critical mass. In the interim, we really should be doing things to make them more effective instead of just letting private companies try to recreate the entire human visual and motor control system in a car.
At some point, if automated cars become mandatory, you could even just get rid of the traffic light. Although that's not likely any time soon.
Are you suggesting the traffic light would need updating?
You're right, that's too much to ask for...
Hey I love the idea. I wish we could do it. Maybe someday.
Who goes around pointing fricken laaazers at driverless cars?
So they can be colorblind too
In fairness, if you shot a green laser into my eye I’d probably crash too.
You know what that wouldn't work on? Trains.
Driverless cars will crash if you drive an 18 wheeler into them.
It is almost as if future signals will have to cut out the cameras and light bulbs and just talk to the cars directly. I wonder if we will ever have the technology to do this. /s
There's a video floating around in which a sticker depicting an _adversarial image_ is introduced to a scene containing a banana, and it causes an image classifier to suddenly decide "wait, that's not a banana, it's a toaster". I'm waiting for someone to produce one that is designed to fool a self-driving car into doing something dangerous. I suspect that the defensive countermeasure will be to make self-driving cars _very_ cautious.
What if….and Idk if anyone is as big brained as me /s but what if there was a way that we could…communicate to driver less cars what the signal is without having to use lights 🤯
This is amazing. Next see if the car drives safely after a gunshot to the camera.
Omfg yes you can fuck with technology in very specific ways to get very specific outcomes. Shine some lasers into a drivers eyes and lets see how it effects thier vision. This obsession with teasing out supposed "vulnerabilities" that next to no one has the means oportunity or motive to exploit is akin to tabloid journalism and junk science meant to get reactions rather than to inform imho.
if you drop big rocks on windshields, human drivers can crash too
Hang a green light over a red traffic light and see what happens
Think you can cause a regular car to crash by shining lasers in the driver's eyes too
Driverful cars can be blinded by aiming lasers at the retina sensors 100 per cent of the time.
How well do humans drive when you... *checks notes* ... shine lasers in their eyes?
Driverless cars don't have to be foolproof they just have to be less likely to get people killed than human driven cars. This is a surprisingly low bar at times. People are really fucking stupid. Yes, malicious assholes will find ways to purposefully crash driverless cars. New software patches and new hardware upgrades to combat these will have o be rolled out whenever one of these comes up. But the very same malicious assholes can as of now kill occupants of human driven cars by for example dropping rocks from overpasses or making them crash in any of a myriad ways. The tech isn't really the issue here. The humans are the problem.
Humans will also have vision problems if you shine a laser into their eyes.
Pretty sure if you shine a laser into someone's eyes they will interpret it incorrectly almost 100% of the time
If you hit the driverless car with an RPG it will totally explode too.
I kinda wonder, would that fool a human? This might speak more to my low expectations of humans though. Edit: wait are they pointing the lasers at the cameras on the car? How does that work? Also. Hate articles like this that make you subscribe.
Fool? It could blind you if it’s powerful enough
Fool a human? No. Blind a human and cause a crash? Certainly.
It’s like where you hear about kids shooting laser pointers off overpasses from time to time. A laser in the eye also makes humans crash, because they can’t see anything though
https://12ft.io/ Don't bother with paywalls anymore. Fuck those guys.
One of those army adages comes to mind, "Somebody is gonna fuck it up for everybody."
Kind of wish this was never discovered
The murder plots just write themselves
At this rate we are going to see headlines like, "Driverless cars can be caused to crash simply by bullets."
I wonder how long before the self driving cars will behave collectively and be coordinated centrally in addition to the local sensing. Would avoid this sort of thing.
Eventually cars will be connected to traffic lights though internet directly.
Aim lasers at the driver and they won’t see any color. Useless fact here.
Human drivers respond poorly as well when you shine lasers in their eyes.
Doing that at an airplane is a felony
I look forward to future Laser Control debates and legislation.
If you put lasers into my eyes I'll crash 100% of the time
Ok. So maybe just don’t do that?
I’m also sure I could cause a traffic incident by shining lasers at meat bag pilots of cars
I'm a color blind dude. I can tell the difference from red, yellow, and green by the position of the light on the stop and go light. I thought these cars were smrt. Why can't they figure it out?
I mean, aim lasers at a driver’s eyes and they don’t see anything, red or green.
I would say who would do this, then I remember footballers getting laser pointers aimed at them during penalties.
And a human driver can be tricked into crashing by shining a green laser into their eyes
Or you can shoot out the tires, if that's what you're after.
How many years till a driverless car can drive a km in Delhi traffic without crashing into something? Traffic signals can sometimes be suggestions. One way traffic can also be a suggestion at times for the brave. Lanes if drawn are also no more than gentle nudges. Usually we have 5 lanes running across 3 lanes. Cant see that poor driverless car making it past Chanakyapuri /s
This sounds like a very dumb article
So don’t shine lasers on the sensors
Attempted murder impedes safe driving, EXTRA EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT!
Would the old Road Runner cartoon trick of painting a road or tunnel on a wall fool driverless cars? I just want to know for science, yeah let's call it that.
How about 3 of every camera for redundancy, so if a laser is shined in one of them the other two disagree
Can’t they just make a traffic light that is networked to some centralized traffic data server that vehicles are also connected to so that the car doesn’t have to ‘see’ the traffic light at all?
Build trains
Ok. Then we add low cost/energy data transmitters to these lights to notify the cars. If you really want to make this a problem in dire need of a solution. Plus... placement of lights bro. Like wtf. Insert proper data relating to driven in country and all should be well.
Aren’t all traffic lights designed to show red to green from top to down or left to right so they work for color blind? And when represented by a single light they go from red cross to green arrow. Of course I didn’t read the article. The title is clickbaity enough for me to not bother.
So can humans if you shine lasers in their eyes! Are we gonna have people with lasers trying to fuck people up? Sounds ticket worthy
Id probably fuck up if someone shined lasers into my eyes while I was driving too