"Surveillance capitalism" companies should be charged with stalking: their goal is to collect all info on all people, placed, and things. And they ought to be charged as accomplices to anyone using their datasets to facilitate criminal activity. I know... it's an unpopular and unrealistic opinion.
>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?
When the newspaper runs an obituary and the next day that person's home is robbed because criminals saw the obit, used publicly accessible records to figure out the address of their home, and made an educated guess that nobody would be there because the previous owner was dead--- Is the newspaper an accomplice?
They likely don’t need to get a warrant. They can just ask your next door neighbor and your neighbor is free to hand over their records that show you leaving/entering your house.
Sounds a bit improper but this is also how when a person robs someone they’re able to put out security footage pretty quickly: “helpful neighbors” actually being legitimately helpful neighbors.
Not a chance. The surveillance cameras on wheels are so cheap to query that you might as well be analyzing the streams constantly, and have them tell you when something interesting is happening.
No way. You have to convince each human to give you the information that you want on a case by case bases every time you want it. We suck at that even when we're being cooperative--which in many cases we aren't. With cars you can just collect it all by default and search for what you need after the fact.
A network of spies is far more expensive to maintain than a network of cameras, wheeled or otherwise.
This absurd thread is a game of telephone as well.
The claim was "We're prohibitively expensive to poll", and I am correct it is cheaper to poll humans. i.e. query X regarding Y, where X is {humans with eyes|cars with cameras}, and Y is the evaluated state of some location at some time.
I do agree if the poster had written "it's cheaper to set up a network of self-driving cars than spies"...well when I put it that way :P...but jk sure I'll say spies.
Every other car is a surveillance node. Smartphones and digital payments, too.
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.
Already today manufacturers will add into their TOS that you are not allowed to reverse engineer their car. Well simple loophole is to just sell the car to third person which did not sign this agreement and then manufacturer's TOS does not apply to him.
Not GP but one reason: gait detection is already good enough (I believe?) to uniquely identify individuals.
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.
Pervasive surveillance means that pedestrians do have a reason wear masks, glasses, etc.
Although it isn't enforced, its already illegal in most places to wear masks in public though. I've seen exceptions carved out for children (because of Halloween) and for people with doctor's notes, but not for cyclists
Interesting! I thought it was effectively “already here” despite not being deployed much/at all.
Surely the value of gait over iris would be that you don’t need ridiculously specialized sensors right? Can use (hypothetically, I guess) a bunch of CCTV sending that’s already out there.
Actually, most of the 24/7 surveillance cameras that I've seen already include a ring of NIR diodes for night vision and a sufficiently close photo from one would suffice.
Even better: the wavelengths used are in the range of 700-900nm, which, as indicated by my smartphone camera picking up the 850nm diodes in my Leap Motion controller, are within the range of off-the-shelf camera sensors.
For a decent image you need the iris to span 70 pixels. A Full HD camera probably won't cut it, but a 4k one installed at the entrance of a building might well be scanning irises and we wouldn't even know it.
> It's much easier to get a detailed image of a person's iris from 100m.
Seriously? That sounds insane, wow. I mean, an iris is like 1cm wide, can you really get a detailed image from 100m away, while the person is walking, looking around, blinking etc.?
EDIT: I mean in the context of surveillance, I can imagine that a dedicated photographer could get such a picture with a fancy camera, but we're talking about 24/7 video surveillance.
> I mean, an iris is like 1cm wide, can you really get a detailed image from 100m away, while the person is walking, looking around, blinking etc.?
I assumed there would be an appropriate setup for that.
In any case systems collecting iris data en masse from 6m were available a decade ago. Ultimately it's just a photo in near infrared, nothing fancy.
The whole reason why this even works is that the iris as a modality has an unrivaled 240+ bits of entropy, so even partial or blurred images yield enough information to identify a person(requiring 60bits at most).
On top of that it's an extremely stable feature. Shabrat Gula was famously identified after almost 20 years, despite being a child when her photo was taken.
Then give me (hell, you pick a person) complete access to your communications. Give up all privacy, even just for this given person. Will you still be free? Or somewhere along the line, does information turn into power?
A hammer won't turn into a weapon unless it's wielded as such. Privacy is necessary for freedom only because humans have a rich history of wielding information as a weapon. If we can't learn to have power without using it to control others, we won't survive as a species.
Yes, and? That’s like saying “you’re only afraid to touch the burner due to learned associations between touching it and getting burned.”
As long as there is a person with access to that surveillance, it will be used to shame and control people. If England had the surveillance it has today 100 years ago, they would have ousted Alan Turing for being gay long before he would have had the chance to help them win the war.
I'm not sure that wielding information as a weapon is as integral to human behavior as heat is to burns. I hope not, anyway. Maybe it is, but freedom isn't unique to us.
For example, it’s extremely hard to get arrested and pretty much impossible to get convicted for saying words in America (despite all the hysteria + legitimate complaints about cancel culture).
Not the case in France.
That single distinction makes a huge, huge difference in practice. It’ll make an even bigger difference if Europe finally teeters over into full far-right populism, as it’s liable to do every few years lately.
>For example, it’s extremely hard to get arrested and pretty much impossible to get convicted for saying words in America (despite all the hysteria + legitimate complaints about cancel culture).
You can't get arrested but you can be socially lynched. You will be fired and unable to find new employment.
Do you think in most of the world people don't react negatively when you say things they don't like? I don't think this is unique to America and using the word "lynching" is beyond hysterical (in the hysteria sense, not the "haha" sense).
Even Trump or someone much smarter than him wouldn't be able to convict someone for 99% of speech in America. The exceptions to free speech are well-established and they're far, far, far fewer in America than in Europe.
I doubt that real self-driving cars will ever be a thing. OK, assisted driving on prepared streets (e.g. highways today or wie roads with some electronic markers in the future) but as soon as you enter smaller roads which are at most as wide as 1.5 cars the "fun" will begin. I could offer some dashcam videos of many such roads here in Europe.
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
Self driving car services already exist in Phoenix and San Francisco.
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).
Depends on one's definition of "self driving" and as a computer scientist with AI training (although that happened during last century ;-) I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens.
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.
> I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens.
There's no human driver in the car. At most, the cars can stop/pull over and ask for remote navigation from humans (but not remote operation).
Granted, there are some niche applications where autonomous vehicles exist. And some level x assisted driving on prepared roads. But I was talking about "real self driving" cars, i.e. cars on any street in any city or even in rural areas. And I still don't see them anywhere, nor do I see them coming in the near future, expect in some tech dreams.
So next up: will they be able to reach profitability servicing SF and Phoenix. So far, highly small scale subsidized pilot projects.
The hardware is more expensive than regular cabs. The software has cost billions, an may cost billions more.
Operationally, energy use should be marginally higher. Hourly cab-driver wages: gone. Insurance and write off — we'll see, but if the software is any good this should be considerably lower.
I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?
Then ice thing about software is that you can copy it at least, even if it’s expensive. LIDAR prices are coming down at a steady rate, although Tesla is still trying to go the vision only route.
> I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?
If we assume the technology won’t improve any longer, this is true. But I don’t think that is a very safe assumption. Everything seems to point to the question being when rather than if.
People said the same shit about Phoenix: "ohhhhhh, but what about the cities that don't have extremely wide streets and almost no pedestrians???" Now that they're in SF, the goalposts immediately move.
Weather will be gradually solved, just like other technical aspects.
Weird. Should tell that to the Waymo that drove me 20 minutes from my home to a restaurant downtown last night. I was the only human in the car, located in the back seat.
From my perspective as an SF resident, it truly does not exist here.
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?
> or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing?
The problem is by the letter of the law, the car can simply never proceed. People drivers don’t need to adhere to that letter so much, so can get creative, auto taxis can’t.
Every waymo ride I have had has been at least as good of a driver as a mediocre Uber driver.
Haven't tried it, but I hear Cruise is considerably worse.
> Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing?
I've done considerable mileage in Waymo and these two situations it handles pretty well. I think the software is improving rapidly - I've reported some problems that happened consistently that a week later seem to have been resolved
I've taken about 40 rides in Waymo in SF with no safety driver. One thing it did handle surprisingly well was a narrow 1.5 car width road, with bumper to bumper on-coming traffic.
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.
True. I saw a self-driving car (not a Tesla) approach a parked car from behind at around 15 mph, then at the last second, swerve around it, leaving what looked like a 6" gap.
I was frightened, but impressed. (Good thing nobody opened the door.)
Yeah, I agree. If everyone was in a self-driving car and predictable it would be fine. As it stands now, the car is basically trying navigate chaos. Humans already do a terrible job, yet we are expecting machines with less experience and less information to do better. It’s asinine.
OK, if two "self driving" cars meet they can negotiate somehow, nice. But they will have to cope with all those older cars and often older drivers in rural areas. Or cows, sheep, or snow drifts or landslides.
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.
Personally, I stopped saying things like that when AlphaGo showed up. Thrashing a 9-dan master also wasn't supposed to be "something that tech could do."
Self driving is a cost problem and a software problem. Over time it will become solved fully and cheap. I can't believe that a human can outperform a computer at paying attention.
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.
That is the issue, but that means that to say that we'll never have self-driving cars is to say that we're either at or close to the limit on advancement of computing technology. That seems implausible to me, and if you don't accept it as a premise, then it's just a question of how long it is before computers surpass people at all of those things.
>> [...] is to say that we're either at or close to the limit on advancement of computing technology.
Well, we are approaching physical limits of minimum transistor size, so that might not be as ridiculous as you think. What if the best we can do is to triple the current processing power, but that's not enough?
That would do it, and I genuinely thank you for being the first person to come up with a counterargument to any of my comments that didn't just involve trying to rules lawyer my language.
I'll ask you what I always ask folks who say that something will never be a thing - do you really think that 1000 years from now, cars won't be able to fully drive themselves under all conditions better than humans? As a reference for the amount of progress we can make in 1000 years, roughly that long ago, someone invented the compass.
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.
Yes but also deeply besides the point the post you are replying to is trying to make.
His question is - can your mind wrap around the amount of progress that can happen in 1000 years? If yes, can you imagine that going from "now" to "fully automated cars" is a small amount of progress, relative to progress that's possible on 1000 years? If yes, great - now you can dial back that it probably won't take 1000 years.
> do you really think that 1000 years from now, cars won't be able to fully drive themselves under all conditions better than humans?
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.
Let me rephrase the question, as folks who are answering in the negative are mostly avoiding the main point.
At any time between now and 1000 years from now, will we have the capability to build a fully self-driving car, assuming that there are no cataclysmic, apocalyptical, or other type of events that render any question of technology irrelevant?
There will be no need for self driving cars in 10 years, because assuming we are still around, we will have car driving humanoid robots that drive our same cars. They will fit into our driver seat, be able to reach all the controls, and when they are not driving they can take care of other stuff.
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.
The question wasn't about relevance, though; it was about technical capability. Whether or not anyone actually uses one, will the technology to make one exist? Regardless of whether they're in use in 1000 years, will one ever have existed?
Driving through Mount Hamilton I realized this as well, I would never trust self driving to those roads up there with thousands of feet of elevation just over the side of the road and parts which must be shared by both directions of traffic.
Doesn't even have to be on a rail crossing. Stopping a car in the middle of an 80mph freeway (whether it's the legal or practical speed limit) would suffice.
I'd think it would be hilarious if a 10 minute hack was done to politicians on the subcommittee that endorsed and/or legalized this, as a demonstration why this tech is horrific. Bonus points if every politician who voted for this had it happen for 10m.
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 :)
Also knowing my fair share of about automotive development, the kill switch would be likely present in all ECU software, including police and other security cars, only not coded (enabled) in the software. So this kill switch is supposed to prevent chases, but it could also enable them by kill switching the police. Irony.
Not "when", "if". Maybe I'm not fit to be in the HN crowd, having lived too many decades on this earth, but I still remember each and every time the government has stepped up spying efforts, and someone says it'll be recalled as soon as it affects a politician.
Honest question: how is it possible for the American public to just accept that? This feels like a politician’s ideal wedge topic. “They want to control YOUR car. Take away your freedom.” And it’s not even hyperbole! For a nation that obsesses over the minutiae of gun legislation for its effects to personal freedom, it’s a bit out of character to let the government build in a remote “accidental” crash button.
Something interesting about this comparison is that in the US, firearms ownership is a Constitutional right, owning and operating a vehicle is not. In fact, it's exclusively considered a revocable privilege. This likely affects significantly the conversation around both.
This isn't the proper subthread to have the grand gun debate and that isn't the point of my comment. But since I was replying to someone who is likely non-American, in the name of accuracy I need to point out what you are saying is directly false. Historically, this right has always been enumerated as individual firearms ownership, and is contextualized as such in the The Federalist Papers by the founding fathers who wrote the text of the Constitution, so there's really no argument to be had here. You can think it's a dumb idea, that it should be restricted or appealed, or any other such things, but to state that the Constitution does not enumerate an individual right of ownership is just patently legally and historically false. There are numerous SCOTUS decisions that also make this abundantly clear.
Thanks! I have some context being Canadian, but I appreciate your explanation.
My thinking was more so that, regardless of legal enshrinement, “freedom” is a pretty universal component of the American ethos. (as I understand it)
You’d imagine that politicians would love to use people’s emotions on the topic, regardless if they have a de jure reason to oppose a change like gun control, or not, in the case of cars with remote off switches.
The thing is that this issue is so niche that it is not anywhere close to being on anyone's political radar. Nobody outside of niche technical forums is thinking about the consequences of their cars being internet connected, or even realize that they are.
As you say, this isn't the place for this debate, but I don't think your historical analysis is accurate. The plain text of the second amendment does not grant an individual right of ownership. It grants the right for communities to have a well-regulated, armed militia. That's a different thing.
But I'll leave that there. I wasn't commenting to put forth a particular political agenda, I was just trying to inject a counterpoint to a thing that I've been hearing more and more that I believe is factually incorrect.
> Something interesting about this comparison is that in the US, firearms ownership is a Constitutional right, owning and operating a vehicle is not.
I consider it a fourth amendment issue. The government has no business remoting into your car, rummaging though its data, and seizing control of your property.
> how is it possible for the American public to just accept that?
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.
A remotely activated killswitch that I install on my car is completely different from a remotely activated killswitch that the government installs on my car.
A killswitch that GM puts on your car without telling you because some marketer thought the value-add was a good strategy is not much different than a killswitch that GM puts on your car without telling you because someone else told them to do it.
In both scenarios, a third party can control your car without any real affirmative consent.
Yes, it was available as an aftermarket option as well. But OnStar is a GM subsidiary and it has been a factory telematics feature in GM vehicles since the 90s. Most other automakers have their own equivalents these days. They vary on which commands can be sent remotely, but they pretty much all will remotely track stolen vehicles.
This is fear-mongering/rage-bait. Lawmakers have by 2026 to make up rules for car manufacturers to follow for new technology regarding drunk drivers. Maybe it's a kill switch, maybe it's not.
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.
People can walk up to any car and cut the brakes or tamper with it in a way to cause an accident. There's always going to be a way for malicious people to do harm. The tradeoffs from having better technology and sdc far outweigh these extreme hypotheticals.
I can only tamper so many physical brakes in a given night. But being able to just disable all brakes of a given firmware revision at the push of a button?
Imagine tapping into a fleet of autonomous electric cars and running them at 120mph towards an important person.
Like I get bulletproof cars, but the stopping power of a single electric car at 4000kg accelerating to 120mph in a matter of seconds changes the calculus completely and that’s before accounting for battery explosions or chemical fires.
Doing that with a single car today without remote execution is a suicide attack, but an army of hackers? Good lord, this sounds like a doomsday scenario.
Also you have to be there physically which presents a lot of risks.
Even if for some reason you had to have close proximity to the car to disable these settings doing at a place that is a disadvantage to the driver helps your position.
Comparisons to physical security are always wrong when it comes to hacking.
When you’re connected to the internet the number of adversaries willing to try goes up by probably 6 orders of magnitude. Not only that, many of them will be living in a regime where there is no possible way for them to get punished by doing it to you.
Ransomware brought significant amounts of income to the North Korean government.
These are not extreme hypotheticals. They’ve shut down fucking hospitals to shake down people for money. Once the opportunity is great enough, they’ll have no qualms stopping people’s cars from starting to ask for a little crypto currency.
> People can walk up to any car and cut the brakes or tamper with it in a way to cause an accident.
The lock on my front door only has to be strong enough to stop whoever wants to physically approach my house and attempt to pick it. The lock on my home network needs to be strong enough to stop anyone in the world from attempting to hack it.
> There's always going to be a way for malicious people to do harm.
This is an example of statement, that while technically true, is so useless it might as well not be. It would be like saying that humans have been killing each other since before nuclear weapons existed, so there is no reason to worry about multi megaton thermonuclear warheads. They are different levels of risk by orders of magnitude.
I think it's unfortunate that this will snarl up pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users. At the same time: the relative lack of surveillance on drivers, especially industrial drivers, has always struck me as strange. There are very few things that are as disproportionately powerful and dangerous as a individual behind the wheel of a car; relative to the destruction that a distracted or impatient driver can cause, there's remarkably little surveillance that can support their victims in court.
(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.)
I agree, and if there were a privacy centric system I may be inclined to support it, however I think with cameras and surveillance it’s akin to give and inch, they take a mile.
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
Maybe: lots of cameras around with evidence available to discovery, but held by relatively many parties (dashcams, private vehicles, business owners) and without automated aggregation and processing of personal information.
I’ll frame it in terms of outcomes: I don’t think any pedestrian or cyclist should be killed anonymously by a driver. I also don’t think drivers should feel empowered to casually disregard the laws of the road, as they currently do when they feel as if there are no consequences.
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.
When discussing populations, stating that a certain outcome should never happen isn’t reasonable. We need to look at the current rate and try to improve upon it.
Trading noise for noise at the population level never works. I’m not sure where all of these anonymous hit and run fatalities are happening in any case. How would you possibly avoid 100% of those even if going full draconian?
This is so dystopian. Some people kill others and run.. but let's not let a few asshole justify draconian surveillance for everyone else. I may like to go faster than the speedlimit sometimes.. why should I give that up?
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.
Mandetory black box dash cams to qualify for insurance. Offline access only. A crash where dash cam is not recoverable is going to be one where the driver shouldn't walk away regardless.
Aren't dashcams a form of a distributed surveillance system? Witnesses or victims of an accident often capture valuable evidence with dashcams of what happened
Bicycles can absolutely have dashcams, there are a few models on the market that attach to the rear because most collisions come from the rear. They have a built-in red light and can take continuous video and detect collisions.
if they have money they can buy a gopro; I've known many cyclists who list having the record of a potential accident as one of their reasons for buying and using a gopro.
Basically all modern cars have electronic speed limiters, normally set to the speed rating of the originally equipped tires. Those bikes aren't geofenced either. Geofencing is hard because an official database doesn't exist, and cars can travel across thousands of jurisdictions.
Speeding is massively profitable for local governments. Most DC speed cameras make things much less safe by creating artificial bottlenecks on highways (there’s a 40 mph speed camera on I-66 which is 75 most of the country), but they put them in place based on projected revenue increases
I agree, but since we are effectively on an honor system for displaying valid, unobstructed plates and paying your tickets, more and more video-based accountability for driving behavior is a tax on conscientiousness that will make people feel like suckers and encourage them to defect.
Self driving cars have been only a few years out for how long now? So much money has been dumped into them and it’s not unreasonable to imagine that they may never be “good enough”.
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.
You can hail a ride in a self-driving vehicle in multiple cities, with any of several companies. Yeah, there's more refinement necessary, but autonomous vehicles are a long way from "perpetually 5 years away" syndrome.
Multiple promising experiments show that it's technically possible. That's an important step, but still mostly shows this is theoretically working until you can show me a profitable company that replaced human drivers without huge VC subsidies.
I feel like the term "self driving car" is solely about the technical performance. The financials of whether they make sense as commercial vehicles or if the companies running them are profitable are entirely separate matters.
To put it another way, a computer that only the 5 richest kings in Europe can afford is still a computer.
Okay, that makes sense. Men on moon was 5 years away in 1964. I might argue that today men on the moon are over 50 years away, in the sense that currently there's no-one there. Guess it's a half-full / half-empty, discussion. Technically, humans can walk the moon, but moon walking isn't actually a thing.
With self-driving cars, I'd argue mixed bag. Yes, it's already possible (with caveats), but "no" it's also at least five years away. When can I have it? When would it make sense for an existing cab company to jump ship? I mean, fire the drivers and replace old fleet with commodity self driving cars.
Personally I'm not so interested in what kings, millionaires, governments can achieve unless it's either a stunning scientific achievement or somehow relevant improvement to society.
Existence is an important first step. I'd argue it's still at least five years away from replacing my daily commute, though.
So, were the train experiments successful? If so, what is stopping it from replacing regular trains?
From a distance, trains should be simpler: it's just a horizontal elevator. So why are there still mostly regular trains? I think answering that will likely help explain why self-driving cars won't be a thing in at least another 10-20 years.
There's a lot of driverless train systems in the world, from "automatic driving with an operator on board" (Londons DLR system for example) to fully automatic "driver/operator-less system" (i.e. very probably every time you've taken a sky tram at an airport)
But by and far the majority of trains are still human operated. Even though the traffic rules are very straight forward ("get out of my way, or...") and the guidance systems, robotics, CC surveillance, scheduling and logistics are 99% there in (for example) major parts of continental Europe.
So why are train services in Germany, Netherlands, France frequently canceled for lack of train drivers? I honoustly don't know the answer but I wager that return on investment plays a significant role. And I think the self-driving car rationale isn't all that different, except for the easy venture billions of the last decade(s).
Well usually it’s because of train worker union strikes and lots of lobbying on their behalf.
The reality is it’s political suicide to put that many people out of work in one fell swoop and it’s expensive to replace all rolling stock in one go.
So it’s down to a slow and steady war of attrition.
Example: London Underground is being slowly but surely automated, while keeping an operator who is “not a driver” until they are no longer needed. And that’s one of the oldest metro train systems in the world
Cables are probably the least reliable way of actuating brakes. They're very sensitive to corrosion and debris. After 20 years it is not uncommon for them to stretch, bind, or snap.
Maybe if you live in the rust belt. They are shielded from the weather and are coated in corrosion inhibitors. They should be inspected and adjusted when the brakes are serviced. You’re not wrong in that they can be sensitive to corrosion and dirt, but to say they’re least reliable for an e-brake is not correct. Even the electric e-brakes use cables.
Is there another type of e-brake besides line locks and cables on regular cars? I’ve only messed with a few cars with electronic e-brakes and most everything else I’m experienced with is pre 2005. Have they cheaped out on the cables now?
I haven’t worked on those before, I did a Subaru that had an electric motor with cables going to the calipers. Lots of adjusting cables on old stuff but almost never have to replace cables, just adjust them. Had to replace a lot of throttle and clutch cables though.
Wait… really? Handbrake as in the parking/emergency brake? I thought it was still physically connected (hydraulic or cable) to some disc brakes as standard? I also don’t drive so maybe that’s changed in new cars?
Yes, that handbrake. You can likely still find the hydraulic or cable operated ones on low-cost automobiles, but new cars (at least in USA) almost universally have a little button to electrically enable the parking brake. In more advanced cars with an automatic transmission these electric parking brakes are automatically enabled and disabled when switching into park and drive mode.
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.
Yeah unless you live in a very hilly place it probably isn’t used too often. But it’s also the “I don’t care about what happens, stop the car NOW” brake in my head. “E-brake” is what I learned it as. I’m surprised people are ok with that being on the same drive-by-wire system as the standard brake.
I lent a car to someone in college who only noticed the ebrake was still on when a campus officer flagged them down to ask why the back wheel was smoking.
> Probably bad to rely on it in an emergency given it has no abs
If the normal brakes don't work (which, admittedly, is much rarer these days), it's your last line of defense.
It's less important than it used to be, with dual redundancy required by regulation and with digital systems monitoring both braking loops. But there's still single points of failure on the brake pedal (like the pedal itself).
It's called either handbrake or parking brake and that is what it is. I think calling it "e-brake" is American thing, bit weird like calling starter motor a "railroad e-motor".
Anyways, other reasons for electric parking brake than already discussed is hill and stop light hold. Electronic brake pedal control relies on stored negative pressure on brake booster and cannot maintain pressure indefinitely, as opposed to electric parking brake which can.
For automatics it is an improvement over a cable that will rust up and keep your brake partially activated. I never use mine because it just forces additional repair expense.
Do we have a problem because of this? I use the handbrake when driving standard transmission in Europe but never when driving an automatic. Never had an issue because of it or heard of anyone who has.
Obviously my experience is limited but genuinely curious - what problems have we suffered because people w automatic transmissions just use "park"? If "none" then I guess I can't lament the disappearance of the handbrake although I did find it odd that my highlander only has the button which engages itself.
Automotive engineers view it as a problem but most drivers probably are unaffected by it in their lifetime. A passenger car's automatic transmission is generally just a bad choice of a device to immobilize a car's wheels. It is difficult to service and has other uses (namely: propel the vehicle) that are prioritized in the design. By contrast, wheel brakes are designed to be easily serviced and their design is centered around stopping the car.
When relying on the transmission for park, this engineering trade off results in the entire lateral force of the car resting on a tiny little piece of metal inside the transmission, that isn't designed to be constantly worn, the only thing keeping the car in place, easily replaced, etc.
There's also this aspect of - transmissions are mutable, they can go in a lot of different vehicles. You can have the same transmission in a 2000lb sports car and a 8000lb truck. How big should the parking pawl in that transmission be? How do you make that decision before you even know what vehicles the transmission will go into? What happens when your transmission that was originally designed for a 2000lb sports car ends up 20 years later in a 9,000lb truck towing a 3,500lb trailer? The parking pawl does not change.
Brakes will be serviced dozens of times over the lifetime of a vehicle, while the transmission might never be serviced. That's enough reason alone to leave the important task of immobilizing the car to the brakes, not the transmission, in my opinion.
As an engineer I can appreciate what you are saying. But as a product manager: the question I am asking is if it matters?
Do we have problems (eg transmissions failing faster) because of this. Or people getting injured etc? Because if not, it's just a distinction without a difference?
EDIT: I think you added the first sentence of your post after I read and replied to it. That was the answer I am looking for, thank you.
Also, if the problem is safety related, is it really solved? Because I don't think the parking break of any car is able to stop the car when the engine is pushing it. Instead, I've seen some catch fire because the driver tried that.
If it's just for maintenance, I don't see any problem with it being electric.
This surprises me. In Australia, the way I was taught to park an auto was:
* Apply the brake (the pedal)
* Place the transmission into park
* While the brake pedal is still pressed, apply the handbrake
* Release the brake pedal.
This means the car is held in place by the handbrake with the transmission park as a backup, rather than the transmission park being the only thing holding the car.
Bonus: if you park on a slope, turn the wheels towards the pavement so that if the car starts moving, it will hit the pavement edge instead of running straight down the road.
To move a car in "P" without brakes, you just need to cause enough force to make the parking pawl fail. And it's just a little cog on a gear, it can be worn down by continuous use, without you knowing. I would not trust that on a hill, no way.
> Constant use of only the parking pawl, especially when parking on a steep incline, means that driveline components, and transmission internals, are kept constantly under stress, and can cause wear and eventual failure of the parking pawl or transmission linkage.
I think it is unlikely from a simple reason: Today when you will buy "connected" car the manufacturer wants YOU to pay the internet bill for your car. But what are your incentives to pay internet for the car, when you likely already have internet in your phone? Nil.
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?
Self driving cars already exist and like the article discusses, they do store massive amounts of data about what they saw. AV companies aren't paying to send (most of) that data over cellular though. It'd completely overwhelm the network. Instead, they're storing it locally and offloading when the vehicle returns to the garage. That data currently remains available internally for use in test scenario development, for legal reasons, and to be able to run post-hoc analyses to find old instances of newly discovered misbehavior, among others.
> they do store massive amounts of data about what they saw.
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.
You're missing some key considerations is what I'll say.
It's pretty safe to assume that the basic combo of sensor outputs+vehicle logs will be retained (subject to retention period) for the foreseeable future, both of which have potential privacy issues. All the relevant companies have lots of internal discussion about this, but very little makes it into the public sphere.
Continuously recording video to on board flash will eventually wear out the storage. It won't last for a 10+ year vehicle life span. Making it user serviceable will just encourage fraud.
It's publicly known that the Waymo Pacificas were using FPGAs and Xeons running Linux for their main compute, which generates most of the logs and processes the sensor data.
So given that context, how likely do you think it is that they're logging it all to terabytes of onboard flash?
But also, lifetime analysis is standard practice during the design phase.
I worked for a while at an auto supplier (heavy vehicle like semis, buses, RVs, and military) in their test labs. The bean counting is real. I remember one test we had to do involved replacing a single bolt in a 200lb wheel assembly with one whose threads were 30% shorter and barely made it through the hole. It wasn't a clearance issue, per the PM and engineer, it was because shrinking that bolt saved half a penny per wheel end (or something small like that) and would put them under their targeted cost per unit, nevermind the hundreds of hours of testing that had to be run to validate the new assembly.
PMs are given a target price and a target cost. They will do everything in their power to get under it because their job depends on it. Those drives are going to be the bare minimum necessary for storing what they need to (not what they want to) and will likely have a very short lifespan overall.
When car companies start making enough money selling the data they collect they'll add all the storage needed to keep the cash flowing. If the lifespan is short they'll just force the user to get the car serviced and make them pay to replace it at the drivers expense.
> Today when you will buy "connected" car the manufacturer wants YOU to pay the internet bill for your car.
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).
One thing is sending telemetry and occasional update to a car. Could be done via pre-charged SIM on X GB to hold during the cars warranty. Other thing is uploading GBs of data from sensors and cameras.
This isn't an issue. At some point there will be "safe driving subsidies" paid by the government to car manufacturers who opt-in to uploading all footage into NSA-approved databases. I know what you're thinking..."oh, the old slippery slope blah blah" but PRISM is alive and well (and nobody gives a shit that it's alive and well) so things like this are entirely within the range of "could easily happen with very little effort."
Your car may already be using your phone's data. If you pair your phone with your car there is a Bluetooth protocol that lets your car's cellular radio authenticate using your phone's SIM. But, yes, if they try sending absurd amounts of data people are going to notice their allowances running out.
Maybe nobody (corporation/gov) is paying for that right now, but if all of those things become cheap enough to make sense to do (cost of transmission/ storage/processing are low enough to turn a profit or get the data you want) then someone (corporation/gov) will do it.
iirc owner access to the cameras on Teslas is pretty limited (and finicky). I thought it would be great if Tesla footage could automatically hook into the AMBER alert database.
I have mixed feelings about this. It sounds good in theory (save the children!) but it takes nothing to expand that to turn the entire environment against anybody who finds themselves an enemy of the state. Good luck whistleblowing at that point.
Whatever your opinion of him, Snowden never would have made it out of the country. His own car would have detained him.
Why do self-driving cars store the videos at all (apart from a subset that was notified by the operator for further review)? Given the number of cameras and angles, the storage cost must be far from negligible.
Great! I just installed a front and rear camera system in my new car since my last one was totaled by a hit and run driver in a busy intersection. The (off duty) police officer who saw the whole thing told me it would be useless to call the authorities without a license plate number. Fool me once.
Why are self-driving cars singled out in this article? I have a 2015 Subaru Forester that I wired up with front and back cameras. My brother's brand new Silverado has a 360 degree view camera that constantly records stuff too.
Because self-driving cars are owned by a company which provides an easy contact point for law enforcement.
> 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.
Is there any jurisdiction in the world where people are guaranteed a right to privacy in public spaces? And if there were, in what impossible-to-imagine way would that possibly be enforced? I think the fight for an expanded right to privacy should be focused on realistic goals, not this kind of paranoid all-or-nothing nonsense. If you don't want to be recorded in public there is one and only one solution.
Like any technology, like the internet or guns, it can be used for good or ill. The real line of defense to bad tech uses should be at the societal level, with a fallback to the legal level. If people want surveillance tech spying on them (to reduce crime, etc) then no amount of legal prohibition or technological safeguards will stop it.
Not sure why this fear is exclusive to self driving vehicles. I have two ICE vehicles that both have multiple cameras on the exterior and 4g connectivity. Lot of mid priced cars now come with these cameras for collision avoidance , lane keep and other uses.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] thread(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?
What if government agencies and oligarchies benefit form that stalking, too?
Sounds a bit improper but this is also how when a person robs someone they’re able to put out security footage pretty quickly: “helpful neighbors” actually being legitimately helpful neighbors.
To be clear, the surveillance cameras on legs are cheaper to query than the surveillance cameras on wheels
A network of spies is far more expensive to maintain than a network of cameras, wheeled or otherwise.
The claim was "We're prohibitively expensive to poll", and I am correct it is cheaper to poll humans. i.e. query X regarding Y, where X is {humans with eyes|cars with cameras}, and Y is the evaluated state of some location at some time.
I do agree if the poster had written "it's cheaper to set up a network of self-driving cars than spies"...well when I put it that way :P...but jk sure I'll say spies.
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 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...
No antenna. No signal. No datalink.
But yeah, no guarantees that this is possible, or terminating all external antenna connectors is sufficient.
I can put my car in offline mode (blue link).
Or remotely nerf your car if you miss a few payments?
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.
Although it isn't enforced, its already illegal in most places to wear masks in public though. I've seen exceptions carved out for children (because of Halloween) and for people with doctor's notes, but not for cyclists
Gait is one of those modalities that gets rediscovered every decade only to, again, yield no results.
There's just too much noise and variability over time for it to qualify for broader use.
It's much easier to get a detailed image of a person's iris from 100m.
Surely the value of gait over iris would be that you don’t need ridiculously specialized sensors right? Can use (hypothetically, I guess) a bunch of CCTV sending that’s already out there.
Samsung used to put them in their phones and they seem to have been using just one frequency.
Even better: the wavelengths used are in the range of 700-900nm, which, as indicated by my smartphone camera picking up the 850nm diodes in my Leap Motion controller, are within the range of off-the-shelf camera sensors.
For a decent image you need the iris to span 70 pixels. A Full HD camera probably won't cut it, but a 4k one installed at the entrance of a building might well be scanning irises and we wouldn't even know it.
Seriously? That sounds insane, wow. I mean, an iris is like 1cm wide, can you really get a detailed image from 100m away, while the person is walking, looking around, blinking etc.?
EDIT: I mean in the context of surveillance, I can imagine that a dedicated photographer could get such a picture with a fancy camera, but we're talking about 24/7 video surveillance.
I assumed there would be an appropriate setup for that.
In any case systems collecting iris data en masse from 6m were available a decade ago. Ultimately it's just a photo in near infrared, nothing fancy.
The whole reason why this even works is that the iris as a modality has an unrivaled 240+ bits of entropy, so even partial or blurred images yield enough information to identify a person(requiring 60bits at most).
On top of that it's an extremely stable feature. Shabrat Gula was famously identified after almost 20 years, despite being a child when her photo was taken.
https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~az/lectures/est/iris.pdf
By far the largest database of irises is the one created by India’s Unique Identification Authority, with more than a billion people enrolled:
https://www.irisid.com/indian-national-identity-program-tops...
*does not negate the other ways they can PiD you.
I think that's quite an important *
if you have a phone in your pocket, you're already trackable 24/7
Because of this, bicycles played a significant role in women’s liberation movements.
https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/pedaling-path-freedom
As long as there is a person with access to that surveillance, it will be used to shame and control people. If England had the surveillance it has today 100 years ago, they would have ousted Alan Turing for being gay long before he would have had the chance to help them win the war.
For example, it’s extremely hard to get arrested and pretty much impossible to get convicted for saying words in America (despite all the hysteria + legitimate complaints about cancel culture).
Not the case in France.
That single distinction makes a huge, huge difference in practice. It’ll make an even bigger difference if Europe finally teeters over into full far-right populism, as it’s liable to do every few years lately.
You can't get arrested but you can be socially lynched. You will be fired and unable to find new employment.
I don't think the USA is in any position to throw stones about far-right populism.
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.
There's no human driver in the car. At most, the cars can stop/pull over and ask for remote navigation from humans (but not remote operation).
The hardware is more expensive than regular cabs. The software has cost billions, an may cost billions more.
Operationally, energy use should be marginally higher. Hourly cab-driver wages: gone. Insurance and write off — we'll see, but if the software is any good this should be considerably lower.
I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?
> I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?
If we assume the technology won’t improve any longer, this is true. But I don’t think that is a very safe assumption. Everything seems to point to the question being when rather than if.
People said the same shit about Phoenix: "ohhhhhh, but what about the cities that don't have extremely wide streets and almost no pedestrians???" Now that they're in SF, the goalposts immediately move.
Weather will be gradually solved, just like other technical aspects.
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?
The problem is by the letter of the law, the car can simply never proceed. People drivers don’t need to adhere to that letter so much, so can get creative, auto taxis can’t.
Haven't tried it, but I hear Cruise is considerably worse.
> Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing?
I've done considerable mileage in Waymo and these two situations it handles pretty well. I think the software is improving rapidly - I've reported some problems that happened consistently that a week later seem to have been resolved
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.
Human perception + reaction time is eons compared to how quickly a computer can move the wheels and pedals.
Whether the machine makes the _right_ decision is much more difficult, but a computer can actuate with speed and precision humans simply cannot.
This is why I said what I said; the OP wording implies they meant just that.
I was frightened, but impressed. (Good thing nobody opened the door.)
FSD Beta handles this now, including the negotiation of which car passes first
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6KLC3S5gc
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.
Humans aren't really all that special.
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.
Well, we are approaching physical limits of minimum transistor size, so that might not be as ridiculous as you think. What if the best we can do is to triple the current processing power, but that's not enough?
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
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.
His question is - can your mind wrap around the amount of progress that can happen in 1000 years? If yes, can you imagine that going from "now" to "fully automated cars" is a small amount of progress, relative to progress that's possible on 1000 years? If yes, great - now you can dial back that it probably won't take 1000 years.
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.
At any time between now and 1000 years from now, will we have the capability to build a fully self-driving car, assuming that there are no cataclysmic, apocalyptical, or other type of events that render any question of technology irrelevant?
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.
And yes, it's prone to all kinds of abuse by all kinds of "interest groups" …
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 :)
And it never really does.
Maybe. This is far from clear. It certainly wasn't considered as such by anybody until the 20th century.
My thinking was more so that, regardless of legal enshrinement, “freedom” is a pretty universal component of the American ethos. (as I understand it)
You’d imagine that politicians would love to use people’s emotions on the topic, regardless if they have a de jure reason to oppose a change like gun control, or not, in the case of cars with remote off switches.
But I'll leave that there. I wasn't commenting to put forth a particular political agenda, I was just trying to inject a counterpoint to a thing that I've been hearing more and more that I believe is factually incorrect.
Actual text from the 2nd amendment—pretty obvious why your comment is being flagged.
I consider it a fourth amendment issue. The government has no business remoting into your car, rummaging though its data, and seizing control of your property.
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
A killswitch that GM puts on your car without telling you because some marketer thought the value-add was a good strategy is not much different than a killswitch that GM puts on your car without telling you because someone else told them to do it.
In both scenarios, a third party can control your car without any real affirmative consent.
If it's now included by default on every car, then yes, I agree with you.
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.
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...
These are totally different scenarios.
Like I get bulletproof cars, but the stopping power of a single electric car at 4000kg accelerating to 120mph in a matter of seconds changes the calculus completely and that’s before accounting for battery explosions or chemical fires.
Doing that with a single car today without remote execution is a suicide attack, but an army of hackers? Good lord, this sounds like a doomsday scenario.
Even if for some reason you had to have close proximity to the car to disable these settings doing at a place that is a disadvantage to the driver helps your position.
When you’re connected to the internet the number of adversaries willing to try goes up by probably 6 orders of magnitude. Not only that, many of them will be living in a regime where there is no possible way for them to get punished by doing it to you.
Ransomware brought significant amounts of income to the North Korean government.
These are not extreme hypotheticals. They’ve shut down fucking hospitals to shake down people for money. Once the opportunity is great enough, they’ll have no qualms stopping people’s cars from starting to ask for a little crypto currency.
The lock on my front door only has to be strong enough to stop whoever wants to physically approach my house and attempt to pick it. The lock on my home network needs to be strong enough to stop anyone in the world from attempting to hack it.
> There's always going to be a way for malicious people to do harm.
This is an example of statement, that while technically true, is so useless it might as well not be. It would be like saying that humans have been killing each other since before nuclear weapons existed, so there is no reason to worry about multi megaton thermonuclear warheads. They are different levels of risk by orders of magnitude.
(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.
Concentrated power with cameras-- one party controlling a lot of them, and doing automated aggregation of information-- has been bad for privacy.
Lots of cameras in public without the abuses of aggregating information seems best.
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.
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.
To put it another way, a computer that only the 5 richest kings in Europe can afford is still a computer.
With self-driving cars, I'd argue mixed bag. Yes, it's already possible (with caveats), but "no" it's also at least five years away. When can I have it? When would it make sense for an existing cab company to jump ship? I mean, fire the drivers and replace old fleet with commodity self driving cars.
Personally I'm not so interested in what kings, millionaires, governments can achieve unless it's either a stunning scientific achievement or somehow relevant improvement to society.
So, were the train experiments successful? If so, what is stopping it from replacing regular trains?
From a distance, trains should be simpler: it's just a horizontal elevator. So why are there still mostly regular trains? I think answering that will likely help explain why self-driving cars won't be a thing in at least another 10-20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driver-less_train_syst...
But by and far the majority of trains are still human operated. Even though the traffic rules are very straight forward ("get out of my way, or...") and the guidance systems, robotics, CC surveillance, scheduling and logistics are 99% there in (for example) major parts of continental Europe.
So why are train services in Germany, Netherlands, France frequently canceled for lack of train drivers? I honoustly don't know the answer but I wager that return on investment plays a significant role. And I think the self-driving car rationale isn't all that different, except for the easy venture billions of the last decade(s).
The reality is it’s political suicide to put that many people out of work in one fell swoop and it’s expensive to replace all rolling stock in one go.
So it’s down to a slow and steady war of attrition.
Example: London Underground is being slowly but surely automated, while keeping an operator who is “not a driver” until they are no longer needed. And that’s one of the oldest metro train systems in the world
What else needs to be uncloaked as surveillance technology before people stop trusting big tech?
Is there another type of e-brake besides line locks and cables on regular cars? I’ve only messed with a few cars with electronic e-brakes and most everything else I’m experienced with is pre 2005. Have they cheaped out on the cables now?
e.g. https://data.embeddedcomputing.com/uploads/resize/1256/756/e...
And FWIW, a quick image search for 'electronic parking brake' only shows this style.
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.
If the normal brakes don't work (which, admittedly, is much rarer these days), it's your last line of defense.
It's less important than it used to be, with dual redundancy required by regulation and with digital systems monitoring both braking loops. But there's still single points of failure on the brake pedal (like the pedal itself).
Anyways, other reasons for electric parking brake than already discussed is hill and stop light hold. Electronic brake pedal control relies on stored negative pressure on brake booster and cannot maintain pressure indefinitely, as opposed to electric parking brake which can.
Super common in some areas to see handbrakes used all the time (ex: Atlanta, very hilly, lots of names like "Druid hills" and "piedmont").
Super common in some areas to see handbrake usage discouraged entirely (ex: Northern states, where the concern is that it'll freeze up)
Super common in some areas to see no one care at all because it's just flat everywhere (ex: texas)
Obviously my experience is limited but genuinely curious - what problems have we suffered because people w automatic transmissions just use "park"? If "none" then I guess I can't lament the disappearance of the handbrake although I did find it odd that my highlander only has the button which engages itself.
When relying on the transmission for park, this engineering trade off results in the entire lateral force of the car resting on a tiny little piece of metal inside the transmission, that isn't designed to be constantly worn, the only thing keeping the car in place, easily replaced, etc.
There's also this aspect of - transmissions are mutable, they can go in a lot of different vehicles. You can have the same transmission in a 2000lb sports car and a 8000lb truck. How big should the parking pawl in that transmission be? How do you make that decision before you even know what vehicles the transmission will go into? What happens when your transmission that was originally designed for a 2000lb sports car ends up 20 years later in a 9,000lb truck towing a 3,500lb trailer? The parking pawl does not change.
Brakes will be serviced dozens of times over the lifetime of a vehicle, while the transmission might never be serviced. That's enough reason alone to leave the important task of immobilizing the car to the brakes, not the transmission, in my opinion.
Do we have problems (eg transmissions failing faster) because of this. Or people getting injured etc? Because if not, it's just a distinction without a difference?
EDIT: I think you added the first sentence of your post after I read and replied to it. That was the answer I am looking for, thank you.
If it's just for maintenance, I don't see any problem with it being electric.
* Apply the brake (the pedal)
* Place the transmission into park
* While the brake pedal is still pressed, apply the handbrake
* Release the brake pedal.
This means the car is held in place by the handbrake with the transmission park as a backup, rather than the transmission park being the only thing holding the car.
Bonus: if you park on a slope, turn the wheels towards the pavement so that if the car starts moving, it will hit the pavement edge instead of running straight down the road.
> Constant use of only the parking pawl, especially when parking on a steep incline, means that driveline components, and transmission internals, are kept constantly under stress, and can cause wear and eventual failure of the parking pawl or transmission linkage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_pawl#:~:text=Constant%....
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
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.
It's pretty safe to assume that the basic combo of sensor outputs+vehicle logs will be retained (subject to retention period) for the foreseeable future, both of which have potential privacy issues. All the relevant companies have lots of internal discussion about this, but very little makes it into the public sphere.
So given that context, how likely do you think it is that they're logging it all to terabytes of onboard flash?
But also, lifetime analysis is standard practice during the design phase.
PMs are given a target price and a target cost. They will do everything in their power to get under it because their job depends on it. Those drives are going to be the bare minimum necessary for storing what they need to (not what they want to) and will likely have a very short lifespan overall.
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).
Whatever your opinion of him, Snowden never would have made it out of the country. His own car would have detained him.
> 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.
Stay inside.
[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...