Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Cars will punish jaywalkers

Treehugger.com warns:
In January, Carlton Reid wrote that Makers of driverless cars want cyclists and pedestrians off the roads. He quotes Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn, who says pesky cyclists "don't respect any rules usually." ...

In the Guardian, Laura Laker describes Street wars 2035: can cyclists and driverless cars ever co-exist? She worries that, because AVs are designed to recognize and not run over pedestrians or cyclists, chaos will ensue. ...

Proposed solutions include RFID beacons built into bicycles to warn AVs (and perhaps our cellphones, talking to lamp posts and cars, as we showed a few years ago) or criminalizing walking in front of cars, which would take a photo and send it to the police department, who “will come and arrest you for annoying an autonomous vehicle.”
This is plausible. Pedestrians and others will learn that they can take advantage of autonomous cars being programmed to avoid pedestrians at all costs. So jaywalking will become popular. But then the car lobby will demand that the cars become a jaywalking police force, and videorecording all bad behavior by pedestrians and others and reporting to police. Maybe if you even just make an obscene gesture on the sidewalk, a self-driving car will record it and report it. We have red-light cameras now, but this will be 100x more intrusive.

I suspect that we will also see Mohammedans reprogramming the autonomous cars to be deadly weapons, and to run over pedestrians. These cars will not have secure operating systems, the necessary code will be downloadable from ISIS.

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