A team of researchers from prominent universities – including SUNY Buffalo, Iowa State, UNC Charlotte, and Purdue – were able to turn an autonomous vehicle (AV) operated on the open sourced Apollo driving platform from Chinese web giant Baidu into a deadly weapon by tricking its multi-sensor fusion system, and suggest the attack could be applied to other self-driving cars.
Human-driven cars can be crashed with a brick, or a quart of oil.
Wait until you see what my uncle Jerry can do with a 5th of vodka and his Highlander.
TL;DR: faking out a self-driving system is always going to be possible, and so is faking out humans. But doing so is basically attempted murder, which is why the existence of an exploit like this is not interesting or new. You could also cut the brake lines or rig a bomb to it.
You don’t even have to rig a bomb, a better analogy to the sensor spoofing would be to just shine a sufficiently bright light in the driver’s eyes from the opposite side of the road. Things will go sideways real quick.
It’s not meant to be a perfect example. It’s a comparable principle. Subverting the self-driving like that is more or less equivalent to any other means of attempting to kill someone with their car.
I don’t disagree, i’m simply trying to present a somewhat less extreme (and therefore i think more appealing) version of your argument
People seem to hold computers to a higher standard than other people when performing the same task.
I think human responses vary too much: could you follow a strategy that makes 50% of human drivers crash reliably? probably. Could you follow a strategy to make 100% of autonomous vehicles crash reliably? Almost certainly.
Awwww. Why did you have to break the circlejerk? People were enjoying it!
I was so close to finishing, too. Time to look for another doomsday thread, I guess.
Or if it’s a Tesla you could hack someone’s weather app and thus force them to drive in the rain.
More exciting would be an exploit that renders an unmoving car useless. But exploits like this absolutely will be used in cases were tire-slashing might be used, such as harassing genocidal vips or disrupting police services, especially if it’s difficult to trace the drone to its controller.
And people are demanding for Chinese EVs…people don’t realize it’s not a car anymore, but a computer
This is a general issue with foolling sensors, not an issue specific to Chinese EVa.
This is the real reason Elon Musk doesn’t want people tracking his plane. If we know where he is, Wile E Coyote could catch up to him and trick his car into crashing into a brick wall, by painting a tunnel on it
What a great analogy
Just ban the goddamn things already.
