Comment by lifeisstillgood

Comment by lifeisstillgood 9 hours ago

5 replies

To me this is just one more pillar underlying my assumption that self driving cars that can be left alone on same roads as humans is a pipe dream.

Waymo might have taxis that work in nice daytime streets (but with remote “drone operators”). But dollars to doughnuts someone will try something like this on a waymo taxi the minute it hits reddit front page.

The business model of self driving cars does not include building seperated roadways and junctions. I suspect long distance passenger and light loads are viable (most highways can be expanded to have one or more robo-lanes) but cities are most likely to have drone operators keeping things going and autonomous systems for handling loss of connection etc. the business models are there - they just don’t look like KITT - sadly

blibble 9 hours ago

> But dollars to doughnuts someone will try something like this on a waymo taxi the minute it hits reddit front page.

and once this video gets posted to reddit, an hour later every waymo in the world will be in a ditch

  • theamk 4 hours ago

    Given Waymo's don't actually connect LLMs to wheels, they are pretty safe.

    Even if you fool the sign-recognizing LLM with prompt injection, it'll be an equivalent of wrong road sign. And Waymo is not going to drive into the wall even if someone places a "detour" sign pointing there.

  • skybrian 8 hours ago

    Alternatively, it happens once, Waymo fixes it, and it's fixed everywhere.

    • SoftTalker 6 hours ago

      How does Waymo fix it? They have to be responsive to some signs (official, legitimate ones such as "Lane closed ahead, merge right") so there will always be some injection pathway.

      • skybrian 5 hours ago

        They've mapped the roads and they don't need to drive into a ditch just because there's a new sign. It probably wouldn't be all that hard to come up with criteria for saying "this new sign is suspicious" and flag it for human review. Also, Waymo cars drive pretty conservatively, and can decide to be even more cautious when something's confusing.

        Someone could probably do a DOS attack on the human monitors, though, sort of like what happened with that power outage in San Francisco.