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Wow, I had not thought about how much of a security risk that was, I was just impressed by the self-driving capabilities.
The knowledge that has soured me on self-driving cars as a concept is learning more about cybersecurity.
If every Tesla is running identical software with approximately identical behavior, then there are predictable vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors.
One threat model is that teenage deliquents figure out (hypothetically) that Teslas will swerve to avoid any human-shaped obstacles in the road, so they start jumping in front of Teslas for fun, knowing that they won't get hit.
Another is, of course, malicious code gets injected which, under specific conditions triggers the car to accelerate at maximum and turn into the nearest cylindrical object once it reaches 100mph.
Think of how granular the STUXNET virus was.
The one benefit that human drivers have over robots is we don't have any way to hack humans to become suicidal at scale.
I've been saying for years that "youths" casually carjacking automated cars will be a thing because of this.
And now it's illegal for the company to have cars avoid streets where everyone keeps getting carjacked, so it will just keep happening forever and you'll lose your Wae2.go® Driving Privileges™ Account if you talk about it. Better hope you can afford a fire and urine-proof suit for the bus ride.
So be rabidly against mandated automatic driving.
A) there's absolutely no way to fight the economic pressure to adopt such a useful technology.
B) it's an incredibly useful technology that should be adopted.
C) you also can't fight the reddit "that's not happening and it's awesome that it is" tactic. Which is being used both about the mandates and the terrorizing. (I don't have my bluesky screenshots on this phone, but they're already doing the "haha look how scared those tech bros are, what if we burned them alive in Minecraft tee hee hee" thing with vids of mobs surrounding driverless taxis)
As always the only thing worth fighting is the one struggle against leftism, so that at least some exec will be able to tell the engineers it's ok for the taxis to avoid the intersection of MLK boulevard and Angela Davis Ave after the 20th carload of people are murdered.
I'm talking about 'mandated'. Yes, automated cars are useful.
Would I want to have a car that is connected to the internet or can be operated by a program or an algo ?
Fuck no.
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Yep. The irony is that there is simply NO WAY that any car company would program their vehicles to affirmatively use deadly force in defense of a passenger.
There might be a market for jailbreaks that allow your Waymo or Tesla to run down attackers if you shout a code word or something.
I actually think I'd want my self-driving car to be offline (i.e. not internet connected) at ALL TIMES, and if firmware updates are needed it should only support a physical internet connection then.
And that's already too much of a vector for mischief than I'd like.
"Air-gapped? Don't make me laugh. Show me an Iranian air-gapped defense system and I'll show you a ready victim awaiting our four zero day vulnerabilities."
Yep.
Reading the process by which they managed to inject that code makes you realize the only reason most of us are safe is because smart humans simply do not have any reason to target most of us for any reason.
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At the same time, it being online is extremely useful for navigation, so there'll always be demand for that.
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The continued existence of tech-optimists has been a huge mystery for me for quite a while. How can you observe what happened to all the other cool tech, and not immediately think of everything that can go wrong with it? I don't even think driving people into telephone poles is that much of a threat - such dramatic displays of power are sure to be met with retaliation, and thus are unlikely to happen to begin with. Try Canadian musings about how ridiculous it was that the truckers had the capability to drive into the capital, without the ruling class' approval.
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