Organizations are already forming to protect the act of driving and defend against the more nefarious practices buried in autonomy. While these groups seem to be fueled by passion, many lack the "from our cold dead hands" stridency integral to other resistance movements. The Human Driving Association was founded in 2018 to advocate for making cars safer while protecting the freedom to own and drive them. Introduced via a 12-point "manifesto" published by The Drive, the organization now has nearly 10,000 members. Hagerty, one of the largest insurers of vintage and collectible cars, has launched a similar initiative. Called "Save Driving," it's dedicated to preserving the right of humans to drive and celebrating the joy that driving can bring, all while embracing lifesaving automotive technologies.
These groups worry about threats to personal freedom and privacy if the right to drive is denied to humans. They are concerned with the degrading effect that data-driven, data-deriving self-driving cars may have on society. They worry that the deployment of automated vehicles may further enhance national divisions: for example, those between urbanites—whose densely populated, meticulously mapped cities will be great candidates for autonomy—and outlying rural areas that likely won't have access to the technology. Given that the eventual goal for AV integration is to have all driverless cars connected and speaking the same language, these organizations also fear that the technology will end up being owned entirely by one entity—Google, Amazon, Uber, GM—that capitalizes on our reliance to mine our data and market its products.
Douglas Rushkoff, a media-theory professor at the City University of New York and progenitor of the terms "digital native," "viral media," and "social currency," was prescient in imagining public backlash to a robotized world populated by signs and signals that are readable only by machines. "When they were first talking about autonomous vehicles 10 years ago," Rushkoff says, "I imagined posses of skateboard kids going out at night with spray cans and redrawing street lines to get [AVs] to drive off cliffs or go in circles."
Hackers are already exploiting these new languages. White-hat researchers at Tencent Keen Security Lab in China recently found a simple way to trick the driver-assistance systems in a Tesla. Since these vehicles see and interpret differently than humans do, the introduction of seemingly innocuous signals—in this case, small stickers placed in a roadway—were enough to convince the car to change lanes right into oncoming traffic.
This leads us to one of the most fearsome features of AVs: their capacity to be compromised by rogue actors. Cars could be taken over remotely and manipulated, militarized, or held hostage for ransom. According to David Barzilai, co-founder of automotive cybersecurity firm Karamba Security, "There's a consistent pattern. When systems become connected, they get hacked."
This vulnerability to hacking increases with the quantity of code contained in the product's software. A commercial jet has 15 million lines of code. A contemporary luxury car has 100 million. An autonomous car is estimated to have more than 300 million.
"Hacking today is business," says Barzilai. "It's driven more by money, less by fear. In order to gain the profit of the hacking attempt, you need to make the threat, demonstrate the threat, but not do irreversible damage. And it's more to frighten the OEMs, not the consumers. The idea is to tell the OEMs, 'I have the capability to shut down your fleet. If you don't believe me, watch me shut down a few cars in a random suburb.' "
"So, are we doomed?" we ask Barzilai.
He pauses for a moment. "I would say yes."
When we recently drove a
Cadillac CT6 equipped with the brand's sophisticated Super Cruise hands-free driver-assistance tech, we ran into a bit of trouble. No matter how many times we tried to engage the system, in whatever appropriately geo-mapped highway location we were in, it would not take. When we confronted a Cadillac employee about this, he suggested that the problem might be that it was "too sunny."
Weather and visibility play key roles in the functionality of the suite of cameras and sensors required for driverless cars to "see." "Lidar is extremely sensitive to particles in the air," says Price. "Rain or sand or fog refracts the laser beam as it's traveling out, meaning the signals either get lost or return distorted and unusable. Cameras, on the other hand, are quite resilient to weather, to snow and rain, until it gets extremely heavy" and their lenses get blocked.
Suppliers are developing workarounds. Wipers, heated shields, and specially treated surfaces are used to prevent precipitation buildup. Artificial-intelligence systems are trained to interpret and identify objects distorted by weather. Vehicle-control algorithms are designed to enhance on-road stability. And remote operators maintain oversight, monitoring environmental conditions and rerouting vehicles before they enter areas that are beyond their operational design domain.
Autonomous cars are also being trained to monitor themselves and respond accordingly. "So if visibility drops below a certain point, they go into a degraded mode where the vehicle automatically pulls over to the side of the road," says Price. "Or, depending on the severity, it may just decelerate and find a safe location along the mission route."
Lines of idling, unmanned, unguarded trucks hemmed in by weather and filled with valuable goods. Does anyone else see the plot to a heist movie?
More at:
https://news.yahoo.com/enemies-autonomous-vehicle-workers-hackers-130000987.html
