this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
445 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
60052 readers
4115 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"with some residents rendering them immobile by putting orange cones on the cars’ hoods in protest. "
Could someone explain this? How does an orange cone on the hood immobilize these things?
It's hilarious really. They sense a foreign object and they have to assume an incident happened, so they sit disabled. They go into a shutdown mode until a technician goes on the scene and resets it. As to the technical reasons for "why", that's proprietary and closed source, but based on the behavior we can infer a lot.
Yep, and for good reason honestly. I work in CV and while I don't work on autonomous vehicles, many of the folks I know have previously worked at companies or research institutes on these kinds of problems and all of them agree that in a scenario like this, you should treat the state of the vehicle as compromised and go into an error/shutdown mode.
Nobody wants to give their vehicle an override that can potentially harm the safety of those inside it or around it, and practically speaking there aren't many options that guarantee safety other than this.
But don't they have some sort of remote control? Does it need a technician to see that somebody just put a random cone in there?
"Waymo technician disables safety feature, car kills pedestrian" Or "Waymo disables safety feature to deal with orange codes, car plowed through construction area and killed ten workers"
Not that it's happened, but I imagine their risk management advice says they have to send a tech out to reset it.
"Waymo technician disables safety feature and car kills pedestrian, hacks Bluetooth and starts making threats against humanity"
See, just not worth it.