California Senator Scott Wiener is introducing a new set of bills to make streets safer across the state, including one that would change how you drive.
Sure, the car knows its forward speed from its speedometer.
It doesn’t know the speed limit of the road it’s currently riding on, that’s not as easy to directly measure. Currently the most straightforward way to do this is have it look up its location using GPS, use that data to look up what road the car is driving on, and then look up the speed limit for that section of road. This is far from error prone; GPS isn’t perfect and could, for example, confuse your current position for another road nearby; it might think you’re on a slip road next to the interstate you’re driving on, or think you’re on rather than under an overpass, that sort of thing. The database might be out of date or in error, the data connection to that database might be unreliable…
The California legislative process: First, say something totally reasonable. “People should be able to tell if the products they buy contain poisonous or carcinogenic chemicals, let’s require consumer goods that contain hazardous chemicals to bear a label describing them as such.” Next, do absolutely no research, consult no technicians or engineers, only lawyers and yoga instructors get a say. Once you’ve got all the spelling errors ironed out, have it carved into adamantium so that it’s more permanent than god. Finally, strictly enforce the letter of the law in any way it could be interpreted. Which is why literally every single product that might get sold in California up to and including bottles of mineral water all say THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER on the label, and since literally every manufactured good is labeled as hazardous, consumers have exactly no more information than they used to.
I’m a software engineer with colleagues who work with various localization and short range communication. This is totally technologically feasible. All the “what if it’s not sure” cases just default to the higher limit. It won’t be sufficient for self-driving cars to know how fast to drive, but it will prevent the vast majority of excessive speeding.
The what-ifs are just people either flailing around to not have their speeding curtailed or people who assume half-assed apps from companies that don’t have any reason to care if they’re right are the state of the art. They always come up with absurd reasons why they need to speed or why implementation is impossible whenever any road safety improvement is proposed. It’s a boring and pathological response.
It can be done well. It won’t though. It’ll be done by the lowest bidder, and you’ll get lowest bidder quality.
You’ll also get a lot of over the air traffic for position requests like that, which isn’t a security problem at all, totally. Oh, and I can’t wait for them to base it on 4G cellular connectivity and then a bunch of cars become useless when the networks discontinue that service.
You want safer roads? Make the driver’s test more than a check for a pulse.
Sure, the car knows its forward speed from its speedometer.
It doesn’t know the speed limit of the road it’s currently riding on, that’s not as easy to directly measure. Currently the most straightforward way to do this is have it look up its location using GPS, use that data to look up what road the car is driving on, and then look up the speed limit for that section of road. This is far from error prone; GPS isn’t perfect and could, for example, confuse your current position for another road nearby; it might think you’re on a slip road next to the interstate you’re driving on, or think you’re on rather than under an overpass, that sort of thing. The database might be out of date or in error, the data connection to that database might be unreliable…
The California legislative process: First, say something totally reasonable. “People should be able to tell if the products they buy contain poisonous or carcinogenic chemicals, let’s require consumer goods that contain hazardous chemicals to bear a label describing them as such.” Next, do absolutely no research, consult no technicians or engineers, only lawyers and yoga instructors get a say. Once you’ve got all the spelling errors ironed out, have it carved into adamantium so that it’s more permanent than god. Finally, strictly enforce the letter of the law in any way it could be interpreted. Which is why literally every single product that might get sold in California up to and including bottles of mineral water all say THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER on the label, and since literally every manufactured good is labeled as hazardous, consumers have exactly no more information than they used to.
I’m a software engineer with colleagues who work with various localization and short range communication. This is totally technologically feasible. All the “what if it’s not sure” cases just default to the higher limit. It won’t be sufficient for self-driving cars to know how fast to drive, but it will prevent the vast majority of excessive speeding.
The what-ifs are just people either flailing around to not have their speeding curtailed or people who assume half-assed apps from companies that don’t have any reason to care if they’re right are the state of the art. They always come up with absurd reasons why they need to speed or why implementation is impossible whenever any road safety improvement is proposed. It’s a boring and pathological response.
It can be done well. It won’t though. It’ll be done by the lowest bidder, and you’ll get lowest bidder quality.
You’ll also get a lot of over the air traffic for position requests like that, which isn’t a security problem at all, totally. Oh, and I can’t wait for them to base it on 4G cellular connectivity and then a bunch of cars become useless when the networks discontinue that service.
You want safer roads? Make the driver’s test more than a check for a pulse.