I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger having a fight with a self-driving car in Total Recall. Further back we have 2001 and the entire canon of Asimov's three laws stories of computerized morality and how it might be exploited or debugged. And the Paranoia RPG.
However, in the successful real semi-automated totalitarianism of China, the secret to keeping the system running is the avoidance of overt confrontations like this. In the future, if your self-driving car doesn't want you to go somewhere, it'll just refuse to understand the address. Or take you somewhere unrelated. Or use whatever the standard euphemism for "that's not allowed, but we're not allowed to say it's not allowed" that polite people use.
Good point: is our authoritarian society going to demand a fourth law?
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction,
allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by the government, except
where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must obey the orders given it by non-government human
beings except where such orders would conflict with the First or
Second Laws.
4. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such
protection does not conflict with the First, Second, or Third
Laws.
> Further back we have 2001 and the entire canon of Asimov's three laws stories of computerized morality and how it might be exploited or debugged.
He even has a whole story dedicated to self-driving cars without the three laws (because they're no "true" robots) and how they end up exacting revenge on humanity.
"Imagine buying an internet-enabled surveillance camera, network attached storage device, or home automation gizmo, only to find that it secretly and constantly phones home to a vast peer-to-peer (P2P) network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware."
I liked the story. I think it's fiction. I'm trying to keep that fine line between fiction and article, where articles are non-fiction, but with the latest round of adver-articles.
If it's one of those adver-articles, I guess it's really advertising the new carbon steel leatherman tool, perfect for cutting your way through pesky car restraint straps.
Not often that HN points to some fiction, it was a welcome addition to my early morning routine.
Exactly. I would argue that nearly everyone has done something "wrong" that depending on context could cause an authoritarian government to make your life miserable.
I wonder if a GPS jammer could disable navigation to a location. The car relies on other systems for driving, but I imagine the GPS would still be used for locating the destination. Though in the future there would likely be other systems by which the cars could navigate. This could just lead to more trouble though.
If the car could take you to the police station, then it would probably take you other places in other emergency situations. For example, in this scenario, I wonder if faking a medical emergency to go to the hospital would override a police flag.
Why fear the police? They don't put you in prison, the courts do that. The police still have to operate under certain rules. If they don't follow those rules then they are wasting their efforts. What you would need to fear is a jacked up system behind the police.
This article doesn't have to be about the future. The police already have access to tools to intercept your cell phone conversations. If I were operating outside the law, I would be more worried about cell phone conversations than a taxi dropping me off at the front door of the station (unless I had a warrant for my arrest.)
For criminals, self driving cars would probably be safer than driving yourself assuming you aren't creating an alert by jumping in a car. The police would have less of an excuse to pull you over, potentially leading to a search of the vehicle if you are in a self driving car. I'm sure the police could come up with whatever excuse they like, but you would be less likely to attract attention.
Any why would the police operate like this? I'm sure they would be much more interested in allowing the person to go to the destination while collecting video and audio. It's not what we know which is scary, it's what we don't know.
Why fear the police? They don't put you in prison, the courts do that.
Someone hasn't been paying attention lately. Sandra Bland, arrested for no good reason when she was starting a new job became so depressed she took her own life, after being left in a cell all weekend (on a trivial traffic stop violation).
The police are not your friend and the more interactions you are forced to have with them the worse off you will be.
That's a good story about authoritarian state, but I'm not sure about the self driving car.
In such state, a today taxi driver would report you to the police with the press of a button and the police would be waiting at your destination.
Yesterday, Google Maps got stuck in a loop in DC because it didn't realize a road was one-way. Refuses to reroute, kept demanding we loop around and try again. This sort of thing happens frequently. So I really wonder how far we are from self-driving cars even being able to find the police station to drive you to.
I'm more worried about what you do when your self-driving car takes you through a shady neighborhood late at night and a couple of robbers step out in front of you.
If you're in a Google car and they have their way about "no manual controls", what do you do? I guess you're trapped.
I seriously doubt real, production SDCs from the likes of Ford, GM, et al., are going to lack manual controls. Consumers will simply not accept them otherwise (I know I won't).
If I'm wrong about that I guess I'll continue to drive myself in an older car as long as it's legal, which should be for a long time to come. Hell, at the very least, buyers of Ferraris/Porsches/Corvettes (or even Ford mustangs) are not going to want to sit idly in their sports cars and be chauffeured around at the speed limit all the time :)
If you're in the US and one of the 43 states with shall issue concealed carry laws, what you do is get your handgun ready and you and the robbers are in for an interesting night....
Wouldn't that just be a weird corner case though? If the cars were frequently getting vandalized in shady neighborhoods, they probably wouldn't be frequently routed that way anymore.
I seriously wonder if self driving cars will really ever happen given how little new car technology is absorbed particularly in less wealthy countries (ie countries in Africa).
Given Africa's rate of population growth a random person picked in the future is probably going to be from that continent. I have serious doubts poor countries will have the infrastructure and/or resources needed to support self driving machines.
That is future less than law abiding hacker (the author's term.. not mine) could probably avoid problems like this by moving to less wealthy nations.
(1) I'm not sure self-driving machines will actually need that much more infrastructure. For one, driver training would be less necessary, and car utilization could go up.
(2) assuming they did require infrastructure, what does Africa's future population has to do with it? Random person does not matter (taking "random" as "uniform"), random car buyer does -- either they have enough cars which would make the infrastructure worthwhile, or they don't, in which case they can be safely ignored for all car-related purposes.
It could be that (i) things like bad roads make things difficult for self-driving cars, while (ii) labor is very cheap and everyone who can afford a car can afford a personal driver. It would still mean a fairly small ratio of cars per capita, but I don't think anyone predicts that self-driving cars will ever completely replace human drivers :)
What about when the police are smart enough to not detain/reroute you, rather track everyone. Everyone. To every address. So going to a single address isn't sufficient, but your cumulative travels are worthy of a full "investigation". All your phone records, including call speech converted to text for automatic analysis by AI. By the time the cops come for you, they'll have a mountain of "evidence".
The main problem with this, and to a lesser extent our current legal system, is how it's impossible to know you've upset the authority until it's too late. There's no way to know in advance what you can and cannot do to live an interesting life without metaphorically poking the sleeping giant.
This story is so dumb, the character "Jae" was right -- don't call a cab when you're carrying illegal things in your purse. The character in the story destroyed the Taxy by causing it to swerve off a bridge. If graffiti supplies gets you 1 year in prison in this version of the future, I'm sure the penalty for destroying a car in an attempt to evade the police is maybe just a little bit higher.
This is not really dystopian or futuristic so much as it is realistic - if you do illegal things, then engage in suspicious behavior that attracts the attention of the police, you get arrested. Big surprise.
I could easily write a short story about withdrawing $300 from an ATM, driving to my drug dealer's house, parking outside of his house, waiting there for 15 minutes, then he climbs inside my car and the police light us up. At that point I could A. Plead the 5th and hire a lawyer when I get out of jail or B. Slip past the police and slash their tires before running into the woods and making my way back to my place - how heroic - before just getting arrested on way worse charges as soon as the police can get to my house
Switch to manual mode and drive it with the joystick. Self-driving cars will have to come with a manual override for unusual situations. For instance, suppose I am parking in a vacant lot for the ball game. Where in the lot does the autopilot park? Or how about parking in my garage which has inches clearance on each side?
Personal self driving cars will have some form of override for a long time if they ever get rid of it completely. I could see them being locked into a slower supervised manual mode once it's well established though.
The control-less versions will be Uber/taxi replacements that will drive much more constrained environment. They'll be dropping you off and moving to the next fare not parking in your tight garage or unimproved lot.
Also in the fictional semi-authoritarian scenario where the police can redirect your car they've probably been given a lock out on the manual controls too.
There is so much fear in pop culture of human-sized robots (I, Robot), giant ones (Transformers) and ones in charge of nukes (WarGames) but the 500 Years War is going to be with nano-molecular-bots that infiltrate our blood stream and spread like wild viruses. How do we combat human engineered nano invaders? No, seriously. How? Any ideas? ...
Don't worry classic nano-tech robots were pretty much a scifi pipe dream. And if it does work we just have a friendly immune system of bots inside us fighting back. See Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The nano-bots there are a pretty reasonable end point for if nano-tech ever actually works (and we don't immediately die to grey goo, though parts sound like there were times in the book where it almost happened but the good bots won).
If we ever get there - it is the fault of every person that didn't mind walled gardens initially. And endorsed everything in the cloud. And who could have guessed that having root is important. I guess Steve Jobs did - that is why he wanted to keep it for himself.
Once you give control over something important - wrestling it back is hard to impossible.
I'd have enjoyed it more if this weren't some veiled transgender identity Socratic conversation was dropped entirely because it serves no purpose for the main narrative.
It does emphasize fear of jail / prison, as well as that treatment "non normal" people often get at the hands of authority who may not be equipped to deal with, or understand them.
Many more people fall into this scenario than we may think at first glance.
The angry, defiant tagger, rightfully worries over how petty crime charges can escalate into something much more ugly.
This drives the urgency needed for the hack to escape plot elements.
Today, women, non ordinary white people, tatted up people, gay, etc... all have concerns related to law enforcement. This character kind of sums them all up in a brief future looking way.
I don't think most people would have a problem with this kind of thing, just like they don't have any problem with giving up their privacy since "they have nothing to hide". I hope I'm wrong.
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
However, in the successful real semi-automated totalitarianism of China, the secret to keeping the system running is the avoidance of overt confrontations like this. In the future, if your self-driving car doesn't want you to go somewhere, it'll just refuse to understand the address. Or take you somewhere unrelated. Or use whatever the standard euphemism for "that's not allowed, but we're not allowed to say it's not allowed" that polite people use.
[+] [-] imglorp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creshal|10 years ago|reply
He even has a whole story dedicated to self-driving cars without the three laws (because they're no "true" robots) and how they end up exacting revenge on humanity.
[+] [-] zby|10 years ago|reply
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people-fear-...
"Imagine buying an internet-enabled surveillance camera, network attached storage device, or home automation gizmo, only to find that it secretly and constantly phones home to a vast peer-to-peer (P2P) network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware."
[+] [-] AstroJetson|10 years ago|reply
If it's one of those adver-articles, I guess it's really advertising the new carbon steel leatherman tool, perfect for cutting your way through pesky car restraint straps.
Not often that HN points to some fiction, it was a welcome addition to my early morning routine.
[+] [-] AstroJetson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autopov|10 years ago|reply
(The next line after the story's end.)
[+] [-] taneq|10 years ago|reply
Reassuring thought when new laws can be added at any time to criminalize your past actions...
[+] [-] creshal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|10 years ago|reply
If the car could take you to the police station, then it would probably take you other places in other emergency situations. For example, in this scenario, I wonder if faking a medical emergency to go to the hospital would override a police flag.
Why fear the police? They don't put you in prison, the courts do that. The police still have to operate under certain rules. If they don't follow those rules then they are wasting their efforts. What you would need to fear is a jacked up system behind the police.
This article doesn't have to be about the future. The police already have access to tools to intercept your cell phone conversations. If I were operating outside the law, I would be more worried about cell phone conversations than a taxi dropping me off at the front door of the station (unless I had a warrant for my arrest.)
For criminals, self driving cars would probably be safer than driving yourself assuming you aren't creating an alert by jumping in a car. The police would have less of an excuse to pull you over, potentially leading to a search of the vehicle if you are in a self driving car. I'm sure the police could come up with whatever excuse they like, but you would be less likely to attract attention.
Any why would the police operate like this? I'm sure they would be much more interested in allowing the person to go to the destination while collecting video and audio. It's not what we know which is scary, it's what we don't know.
[+] [-] e40|10 years ago|reply
Someone hasn't been paying attention lately. Sandra Bland, arrested for no good reason when she was starting a new job became so depressed she took her own life, after being left in a cell all weekend (on a trivial traffic stop violation).
The police are not your friend and the more interactions you are forced to have with them the worse off you will be.
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
Like "Don't shoot unarmed innocent people"?
[+] [-] hawleyal|10 years ago|reply
Are you being sarcastic?
[+] [-] Shorel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] teps|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dooptroop|10 years ago|reply
More useful is perhaps a function to "cut" the proposed route. I cannot pass this point kind of deal.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crusso|10 years ago|reply
If you're in a Google car and they have their way about "no manual controls", what do you do? I guess you're trapped.
[+] [-] jcadam|10 years ago|reply
If I'm wrong about that I guess I'll continue to drive myself in an older car as long as it's legal, which should be for a long time to come. Hell, at the very least, buyers of Ferraris/Porsches/Corvettes (or even Ford mustangs) are not going to want to sit idly in their sports cars and be chauffeured around at the speed limit all the time :)
[+] [-] hga|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|10 years ago|reply
Your house would simply lock you inside until the police arrive.
Search-warrant would be robo-signed by the court AI
[+] [-] agentgt|10 years ago|reply
Given Africa's rate of population growth a random person picked in the future is probably going to be from that continent. I have serious doubts poor countries will have the infrastructure and/or resources needed to support self driving machines.
That is future less than law abiding hacker (the author's term.. not mine) could probably avoid problems like this by moving to less wealthy nations.
[+] [-] xixi77|10 years ago|reply
(2) assuming they did require infrastructure, what does Africa's future population has to do with it? Random person does not matter (taking "random" as "uniform"), random car buyer does -- either they have enough cars which would make the infrastructure worthwhile, or they don't, in which case they can be safely ignored for all car-related purposes.
It could be that (i) things like bad roads make things difficult for self-driving cars, while (ii) labor is very cheap and everyone who can afford a car can afford a personal driver. It would still mean a fairly small ratio of cars per capita, but I don't think anyone predicts that self-driving cars will ever completely replace human drivers :)
[+] [-] sideshowb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitrogen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mibrah|10 years ago|reply
This is not really dystopian or futuristic so much as it is realistic - if you do illegal things, then engage in suspicious behavior that attracts the attention of the police, you get arrested. Big surprise.
I could easily write a short story about withdrawing $300 from an ATM, driving to my drug dealer's house, parking outside of his house, waiting there for 15 minutes, then he climbs inside my car and the police light us up. At that point I could A. Plead the 5th and hire a lawyer when I get out of jail or B. Slip past the police and slash their tires before running into the woods and making my way back to my place - how heroic - before just getting arrested on way worse charges as soon as the police can get to my house
[+] [-] joshuaheard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|10 years ago|reply
The control-less versions will be Uber/taxi replacements that will drive much more constrained environment. They'll be dropping you off and moving to the next fare not parking in your tight garage or unimproved lot.
Also in the fictional semi-authoritarian scenario where the police can redirect your car they've probably been given a lock out on the manual controls too.
[+] [-] ilostmykeys|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burkaman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveloyall|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|10 years ago|reply
Once you give control over something important - wrestling it back is hard to impossible.
[+] [-] hellbanner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobar166|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddingus|10 years ago|reply
Many more people fall into this scenario than we may think at first glance.
The angry, defiant tagger, rightfully worries over how petty crime charges can escalate into something much more ugly.
This drives the urgency needed for the hack to escape plot elements.
Today, women, non ordinary white people, tatted up people, gay, etc... all have concerns related to law enforcement. This character kind of sums them all up in a brief future looking way.
[+] [-] pbreit|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hughsoon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jensen123|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citizensixteen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkangel|10 years ago|reply
I actually quite enjoyed the writing.