You can shoot a laser into the eyes of a human driver and cause it to veer off the road too. But that’s illegal and immoral so most people don’t do it.
All of these “attacks on self driving cars” are just different illegal things that a single person can do against a single car.
> All of these “attacks on self driving cars” are just different illegal things that a single person can do against a single car.
A potential difference is that regular attacks on cars don't scale, whereas with some proposed methods against self-driving cars, a single person can attack hundreds of cars just as easily as a single one.
A single laser can be pointed at many eyes. If anything a laser has a much bigger scale than this setup, since most cars are human driven and you would have a lot more targets in the same span of time.
There's nothing you can do with a gun that you can't do with a knife, so what's the big deal?
There's nothing you can do with a pistol that you can't do with an assault weapon, so what's the big deal?
You can make improvised explosives with diesel fuel and fertilizer, so what's the big deal if WalMart wants to sell grenades and mortar rounds?
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Differences in degree of impact and degree of access all matter. In the case of a laser versus an exploit of autonomous navigation, one of the biggest differences is that with the laser, the moment it happens, you are immediately aware is a crisis.
Whereas people use their navigation every day and build more and more trust in it. The notion that it might be malfunctioning and that there is a life-threatening crisis may not occur to drivers until it is too late.
That alone makes for a vast difference between the two scenarios.
I don't see the difference in impact of a laser vs. this setup. If anything, the laser is far more effective, because most cars still have human drivers, so you'll have many more targets in the same span of time.
I think this is more of a difference in recognizing an emergency and dealing with it. If I’m driving and suddenly blinded, I am going to try to do something, immediately.
If my car is on “autopilot” and it seems to be getting ready to leave the highway in the vicinity of an exit, it might take me a while to figure out that the car is not doing what I expect it to do.
Nobody expects a laser, and nobody expects their car to drive off the highway. But if you trust your car, your reaction may be delayed by the cognitive dissonance between what you observe and your belief that the car will do what it has always done under what you believe to be the exact same circumstances.
"But if you trust your car, your reaction may be delayed by the cognitive dissonance between what you observe and your belief that the car will do what it has always done under what you believe to be the exact same circumstances."
The other thing that causes confusion is that once you recognize something is wrong, you now know that you can trust some parts of the system and not others, but you don't know which. Even in aircraft, which often have minutes between recognizing a problem and a crash, people often cannot figure out what the problem is, because they need to have a theory of what is wrong before they can decide what to trust, to decide what is wrong. It's a catch-22.
But we are probably all in violent agreement, in that there are already ways to crash an automobile if it is on the highway and an attacker can get close to it.
you can google "high powered handheld laser for sale" as fast as you could type that and find "50000mW burning laser" for $240 and 500mw lasers for $39 among the top listings...
Yes, you can find cheap high-power lasers that will blind people and ignite things easily available and cheap.
All of these “attacks on self driving cars” are just different illegal things that a single person can do against a single car.
But it doesn’t prove they’re any less safe.