scrubbedexpat098

So when my car can drive itself to work, does that mean I'll be free to take the train? The traffic from the Gong is a nightmare in the mornings, it'll be awesome to be able to kick back and relax.

Also, will the on board puter deliver insulting hand gestures and shout abuse at other computer cars that cut it up?

Beoz

Train from the Gong. Not in your life time. Medium speed rail between the large Australian cities and their close by smaller cities is the stuff of dreams.

ozzieeagle

This is the embryo of the train of the future. We won't be needing rail, just specialist vehicles that break in and out of convoy at specific points and drop and pick up passengers. They are destined to be high speed. All you will need is your subscription of a certain level of service that you deem suitable or can afford for your lifestyle, From exclusive Rolls Royce and High end German "Style" membership to Multi Passenger multi share Tata style and all levels in-between. Car ownership will be finished within 40 years.

They may even tear up conventional rail tracks to convert them to these high-speed long distance systems.

uk_grenada

Imagine the fun we IT bods will have hacking them, applying dodgy upgrades, jailbreaking, and generally sodding about with them. I remember when wifi routers became co-operative, allowing other routers to coexist happily, it took weeks for people to mod them to become effectively road hogs. 'Get out of my way cars, i outrank you...'

I suppose its just the equivalent of lexus lanes,

Beoz

The hack is a big worry. You could hack into a plane's computer now but the difference being, pilots are still there to override any computer issues.

The technology is there, but the red tape and safety guarantees will ensure that the driverless vehicle is still a loooooong way off

scrubbedexpat098

Won't there still be a person there? What's the point of an empty car going anywhere.

GarryP

Ha!

Let's suppose that Mr I M Hacker gets control of an aircraft computer. Now imagine that the autopilot is flying the aircraft - what could they do? Well, the could wait until they were flying low over a city (GPS), then immediately undertake a series of manoeuvres such that the aircraft was upside down, with full rudder, engines cut, etc. and lock out the switch to turn the autopilot off, necessitating the pulling of fuzes. The aircraft would be crashed into the city before they had a hope of recovery.

The reason this doesn't happen is because there are few comms inputs to the systems, and critical systems are often airgapped (eg the entertainment and flight systems don't touch).

And I expect that cars will go a similar way.

In any case, the biggest threat is the human in the loop, same as aircraft. They get it wrong a frightening large percentage of the time, much higher than a hacker could manage. Globally, in one year, 1.25m people die on the roads. If automation just halved that, society would be well up on the deal.

Beoz

I would expect any such attack would occur as a software update rather than in flight but you never know.

And when things go wrong with the auto pilot, the pilots are on hand, constantly monitoring to take control when needed.

Interestingly the possibility of a hack occurring in aircraft is being taken pretty seriously. U.S. GAO - Air Traffic Control: FAA Needs a More Comprehensive Approach to Address Cybersecurity As Agency Transitions to NextGen

Now only very few of us have access to aeroplanes to test the hack, but when and if automation in cars becomes mainstream, the accessibility to fine tune the hack is for there for everyone and sitting right there in your garage.

London, Melbourne, Nice, Barcelona.

I wonder if the governments of these cities are going to put a bit of automation red tape in the way. I bet they will.

Shard

What's more likely for your average medieval terrorist: hacking some software which will have specific anti-hacking protections and/or AI safety overides or renting a vehicle and becoming a martyr the old fashioned way? Red tape exists for everything, it's not going to be a significant to obstacle to driverless vehicles.

Beoz

The old fashioned way was placing a bomb and disappearing into the darkness.

New age is being a martyr.

Trends tend to go in circles.

When the old fashioned way reappears, without the red tape, one could set the car to drive a certain route at a certain time giving the culprit plenty of time to skip out undetected.

uk_grenada

Hah, lets look at a few actual plane disasters.

Etihad airways takes delivery of new 200m pound airbus. They do acceptance testing on the ground, there are about a dozen engineers on board. Part of the test is full brakes on, and run up the engines for a few seconds to 80%. This causes a noisy alarm because you arent supposed to run them up like that in service , the pilot asks an engineer to turn off the noise. On page 793 of the manual it says remove a fuse, which he does and the noise stops.

Unfortunately this tells the plane its flying above 10000 feet, so naturally it takes off the brakes... To be fair there are 2 different explainations, the arabs dont want to appear dumb of course, so here is the link to both, but honestly, complex software+humans=high risk, people died.

The Tale of the Arab Flight Crew

At a french airshow, another airbus was doing a display, it was early in the airbus fly by wire world, and it looks like a software bug. It lowered undercarriage and did a slow run over a runway low. The pilot didnt override the computers as he could have, so they naturally assumed he was going to land and tailored power for that. He wanted full power and to climb away, the plane sulked and he crashed. The french then appear to have hidden the evidence? http://www.crashdehabsheim.net/CRenglish%20phot.pdf


I remember falling asleep on a plane once and being woken by linux. The seat in front had a loose power cable and if kicked it would reboot its [my] screen, which went through a normal linux startup script... On reading it turns out the remote control has power over the scripts execution, Interesting.

GarryP

I could reliably crash the seat back entertainment on an A380 by plugging in a USB stick. I wouldn't bet against being able to take control with a keyboard plugged into that same point during the reboot - it looked like a generic Linux reboot.

Hence why you want an air gap.

Oh, and then there's the bug in the early flight control software of, I think it was an F18, F16 maybe. Where they had a test for zero feeding into an eular angle - which resulted in the plane thinking it was 180 degrees from the orientation it was at - and thus trying to flip the plane upside down to try and 'fix it'.

Bugs, particularly deep seated, inherited, bugs, are more of a problem than AI.

GarryP

Here's another pointer towards automation

AI robots will replace teachers in the classroom, says Sir Anthony Seldon

Mind I don't think he's taken the implications far enough - he's still thinking classrooms.

uk_grenada

Imagine it, you sit in your seat, plug in a joystick and keybard then explain to your fellow passengers that you are going to attempt a take over, or maybe you just pretend you did yes that'll cause some concern but you'd get into trouble...

If i wanted to have 'fun' i'd be looking at the intelsat link, used remotely by the engine makers + boeing and airbus to report live on and control in flight parameters. In more sophisticated uses - how do you think drones work. Taking over an enemies ground station with a 'clone' is a standard military technique to ensure superiority.

Beoz

He is right to a point. A fair degree of learning is repeatable = automation. Teachers who are happy repeating year after year will die. Teachers who want to take automation to achieve results will survive.

After the rope learning is done by automation, in kicks in added value. Like classroom discussion, classroom competition, human interaction.