from the probably-painted-bright-orange dept.
Germany is planning to require "black boxes" in autonomous and semi-autonomous cars:
Germany plans new legislation to require manufacturers of cars equipped with an autopilot function to install a black box to help determine responsibility in the event of an accident, transport ministry sources told Reuters on Monday. The fatal crash of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S car in its Autopilot mode has increased the pressure on industry executives and regulators to ensure that automated driving technology can be deployed safely.
Under the proposal from Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt, drivers will not have to pay attention to traffic or concentrate on steering, but must remain seated at the wheel so they can intervene in the event of an emergency. Manufacturers will also be required to install a black box that records when the autopilot system was active, when the driver drove and when the system requested that the driver take over, according to the proposals. The draft is due to be sent to other ministries for approval this summer, a transport ministry spokesman said.
Look for the kill switch next. Also at Ars Technica.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday July 20 2016, @02:18AM
Humans can't do that. If we are told we don't need to pay attention to traffic or concentrate on steering then we won't - and that means we won't be at all prepared to intervene in the event of an emergency.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @02:25AM
Despite your effort of actually changing the formatting in your reply so it looks to stand out, your point is valid
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @03:05AM
That's an RFC, you insensitive clod!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @03:57AM
What are you on?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @05:46AM
Lynx user detected.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 20 2016, @01:18PM
I love that browser. Now and then a wave of atavism comes over me and I spend a week in CLI, browsing on Lynx, answering email on elm.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday July 21 2016, @02:31AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday July 20 2016, @09:05AM
Agree. Maybe it's really about liability not safety.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday July 20 2016, @09:57AM
Humans can't do that. If we are told we don't need to pay attention to traffic or concentrate on steering then we won't
This. 1000x.
There's a quantum leap to be made between modern cruise control/automatic collision avoidance and true autonomy. Once you let the driver stop making second-by-second decisions, they will zone out, and the computer has to be able to deal with all eventualities - at least as well as a reasonable human driver.
That means it should be legal to operate an autonomous car while drunk, asleep, texting, performing lewd acts with passengers etc. because that is exactly what people will do. That means testing with trained operators in which any human intervention counts as a failure until the incidents-per-mile figure is provably better than for a good human driver (...and that's per comparable mile - not straight-line-freeway miles with autopilot vs. all miles driven by humans). If the car is in autonomous mode then the manufacturer must be liable for any at-fault accidents - they shouldn't have the wriggle-room to blame the driver for failing to intervene.
Or, preferably, the insurance system should be overhauled to avoid this nonsense of assigning fault with zero burden of proof: your car gets wrecked? Your insurer pays. You/your passengers get injured? Your insurer pays. You hit a pedestrian? Your insurer pays. Accident happened because of your dangerous driving? That's up to the police, the criminal justice system and the driver licensing authorities to decide whether you need to be taken off the road. Making insurance companies solely liable for the losses of their own clients should be a zero sum game for consumers & the industry as a whole: the individual insurers won't like it because they won't be able to gamble on dumping more liabilities on their competitors than their competitors dump on them, or make extra money by flogging details of "not at fault" claimants to ambulance-chasing lawyers and overpriced replacement car firms. Boo hoo.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday July 21 2016, @03:55AM
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Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @02:56AM
Airbag controllers already include black box functionality and have since the 1990s -- details vary depending on the car and supplier. When the airbag goes off it keeps a record of various sensor channels from before the crash, this can be played out with the correct tools.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 20 2016, @02:58AM
I think it's a good idea fro a couple of reasons. First, all the sensor data is there anyways, it's not like they'll need to add any. Second, even beyond assigning blame, or other lawyerfest related activities, the data can be used to make sure the same errors never happen again. This can be done to help even in cases where the computer is not at fault.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday July 20 2016, @03:33AM
Blackboxes are already installed in most modern cars, especially the expensive ones.
Some of this can be used to convict you in court.
I suspect these will be a lot more complete, sort of like the ones in Tesla where the company knows you are in an accident before your head stops ringing.
Still I doubt every accident can be programmed never to happen again. There are so many novel ways to get into an accident that preventing each might cause other.
For a perverse form of education I watch a lot of Russian Dashcam videos on youtube. You can learn a lot from them. And some wrecks are just unavoidable.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday July 20 2016, @03:01AM
All the large passenger jets have had black boxes for decades. In light of the 9-11 attacks, why aren't there kill switches in them?
The French government has a smartphone app with which it warned people to take cover from the Bastille Day killer. The warning went out nearly three hours after the attack began. Imagine what they could have accomplished if they had a kill switch.
http://www.itworld.com/article/3095975/in-nice-attack-governments-official-terror-alert-comes-too-late.html [itworld.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @03:38AM
Not many people want to officially be known as the person who used the kill switch on an airliner with lots of passengers.
And not many people want to be in airliners with kill-switches controlled by people outside the plane.
So if there are kill switches in passenger jets they sure aren't going to be official.
The warning went out nearly three hours after the attack began. Imagine what they could have accomplished if they had a kill switch.
Yeah. They might have been able to turn off a vehicle 3 hours AFTER the guy started killing people... If they're lucky they might even pick the right vehicle ;).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 20 2016, @03:53AM
The difference is that not many people can invade the cockpit, and not many pilots go crazy and crash into a mountain, and a killswitch that simply slows the plane down (as would be the case with car/truck kill switches) doesn't make a lot of sense.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Wednesday July 20 2016, @04:28AM
Slow down an aircraft enough and it will stall. That's an effective kill. Slow down a car or truck enough and the criminals can exit to do more mayhem. Building up speed, then suddenly locking the front wheels or steering sharply, could succeed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Wednesday July 20 2016, @11:51AM
In light of the 9-11 attacks, why aren't there kill switches in them?
You really think adding a 'feature' that enables the quick and efficient killing of an airliner full of passengers will improve safety from terrorism?
You don't see any way this could backfire?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 20 2016, @01:20PM
Governments already have kill switches for passenger jets. They're called F-14's.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Gaaark on Wednesday July 20 2016, @03:20AM
By the time the emergency is in progress long enough for the computer to decide it IS an emergency, it's probably too late for the human to see what the emergency is, then successfully react to it.
But, it covers the car companies ass, so. Profit! :)))
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @03:42AM
It will always be recording... Whether it records indefinitely to to the manufacturer's servers or has a more limited storage capacity installed in the chassis remains to be seen. I imagine someday this data will be preserved forever; automatically uploaded to the manufacturer/government. Then it will be sold to insurance companies who will use it to penalize you for every sudden acceleration/braking/swerving. Then it will be sold to everybody else... Fuck self-driving cars.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday July 20 2016, @04:13AM
It will always be recording... Whether it records indefinitely to to the manufacturer's servers or has a more limited storage capacity installed in the chassis remains to be seen.
Look, even Google's servers can't record everything that happens on your smartphone continuously. Much as we suspect they are spying on us, there would be no bandwidth left for the user if smartphones did that.
So I doubt they will record to the manufacturer's servers. Its just not necessary. It will be just like aircraft, a recording loop for some number of minutes, stopped by a crash indication. Maybe with an upload of the last few minutes like Tesla does.
But Continuous uploading for every car on the road seems not in the cards.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 20 2016, @07:01AM
There's no need to continuously upload. A MicroSD card has more than enough space to store a life time of sensor data. From time to time, a summary can be sent, and if something looks suspicious, more specific data can be requested online from the black box by the central server. And in case of a crash, all the data can be read directly from the chip, without a need to upload anything.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday July 20 2016, @10:30AM
Which one is the "+1 properly paranoid" mod?