Uber vs. California - Robot cars not ready for roads?

I still don’t buy the argument that self driving cars = end of individual car ownership. The question you posited is one of the big reasons.

I think Americans in particular are in love with owning their cars. It’s a status symbol, and that won’t change whether it drives itself or not. They want to show off their wealth, have a place to store their stuff, and be assured that the car is ready on-demand when they want to go somewhere.

As a suburban dweller I have no local amenities in reasonable walking distance, especially in a Nebraska winter. If I want to go the ~1 mile to the grocery store to pick up milk I’m damn well not going to want to wait around 10-15 minutes for an Uber style pickup, autonomous or no. I want to get in my own damn car right the heck now and go to the store. And when I leave the store after a few minutes I want to hop in a car and depart immediately. I strongly believe Americans at least will be willing to pay a premium for individual car ownership both for reasons of tradition and for the kind of convenience I described.

I love how every conversation about the inevitable autocar revolution has Luddites being like “yeah, but have you thought about snow? Check and mate, nerds!”

I’m a Minnesotan. We know how to drive in snow (mostly). I have no qualms whatsoever about self-driving cars being able to handle anything short of whiteout conditions (which, btw, humans also handle incredibly poorly) just fine.

These things are (going to be) way, way better equipped to handle the problem of driving than humans are. It is inevitable. And it can’t come soon enough. Individual car ownership is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to society, Reagan inclusive.

I am okay with giving up the car. But then, I didn’t grow up in the US, and find car ownership a hassle.

If cars are autonomous and form long chains on the highway, it would probably beneficial for all the cars to be the same make and model. Otherwise they will all handle differently, and make things (marginally) more difficult for the AI. OTOH, cars already handle differently depending on how many passengers are riding.

I hope you actually understand the origin of that term before you start lobbing at people like you just did.

No worries, I’m sure you have a lecture prepared

So no…

Maybe instead of accusing people of being anti-industry and anti-technology you might give your fellow community members some credit. Expressing concerns about what kind of tests these things have been through and wondering what they’re prepared to handle isn’t the end of all intellect you seem to think it is.

I know the history. I am talking about the modern use of the word. The history is still important though.

It does not exist. There will always be a back door, an alternate access, or manufacturer/dealer method of accessing things. As an example, Tesla cars have over-the-air update notification, and can patch/load that way, or via a wifi connection at your home or work.

As someone who works in networking and security, there is always a way to exploit that as a client, or send it false information as a form of trojan access. It’s not a doctrine, but it’s been shown time after time after time. Nothing is 100% safe and foolproof. We know that autonomous cars at some point need to be able to share data to each other, or to centralized points. Without that, they have no means of group awareness and the benefits of that. So, that’s the wide open door for someone to exploit at some future point. “Massive pile-up in California as it appears the C-Car network has been compromised.”

Someone should make a sci-fi movie about what we’re talking about here.

Or just have a few “random” accidents occur at convenient times to convenient people. Though your example is probably better. Though giving the autonomous car industry it own “Chine Syndrome” might set things back quite a ways.

Could you have some kind of local verification before it cedes update control to the remote server? Perhaps make it so the car has to be parked and in charge mode before any kind of update or remote control can happen. Or a USB with a key file on it that the user normally removes unless they specifically want to give any kind of control to a remote server or request.

How about really powerful point to point encryption?

Just a thought. There has to be some kind of solution, doesn’t there? How does the military prevent people from taking control of armed drones, for instance?

Well allowing updates to the firmware only when the vehicle is not in usage is already a thing, and it would be insane to contemplate otherwise.

An autonomous car isn’t going to update when the key is in the ignition.

“If the bus gets below 50 mph the hackers will be able to override the firmware!” coming soon to theaters.

This is a great counter question. The answer was, “keep it out of their hands.” Now, just one example, Iran has our number..

The same with vehicles. People will always reverse engineer methods to get in, or the technology thereof.

It won’t really matter though. Malicious people and organizations don’t need to hack it on the road, just when it updates. After that, it won’t matter when nor where it is.

I’m all for autonomous cars. But I think, based on how we learn in every other industry, there are going to be some really high profile failures in order to ensure we make things more secure and less prone to hacking and malicious control.

Think about ATMs. For YEARS, many ran Windows CE. Now that there are problems, many have been redesigned.

AHAAhhhhaahahaaa

That is how the systems are being designed, for obvious reasons. The system software is specced to not make changes while the vehicle is in use.

Now can that be circumvented? We’ll see. But I happen to have some insider knowledge on how these systems are being developed, and making changes while the car is in use is considered an absolute do not allow situation.

I thought he was joking about an autonomous car needing a key.

So the most recent edition of the Atlantic has a two page “ad” I guess that tries to explain the future of the autonomous car as seen by Deloitte and Touche.

Any way to see that online?

I don’t know. My daughter has a subscription so that is how I saw it.