I'd drive through that. Looks like a fun tunnel.
As a corollary, does AP1 get fooled by fake signs? Like if I painted a 35mph limit sign? Would hw2 become easily fooled by a painted stop sign? How to get a NN to separate realistic vs real?
This brings up an interesting problem for all autonomous systems from all manufacturers. As autonomous cars start to hit the road in more numbers, pranksters will start messing with road signs to confuse the AIs. Initially it will be kids pulling pranks, but like computer viruses which in the beginning were mostly nuisance things have become a major underground industry today.
Some hackers have shown they could over ride critical driving systems on some cars remotely (mostly Jeeps), but what if hackers start over-riding autonomous cars? If car have gotten to the point where a driver can't take over (no driver controls), then the hacker can do whatever they want with the car.
There was a show a couple of years back that took place in the near future where most cars were electric. They used some Teslas and BMW i3s. I think it was called Extant or something like that. I watched the first season and it was one of those shows that was barely holding together by the end of the first season and I quit after it jumped the shark early in the first season. Anyway, a major character was killed off when the autonomous taxi he was riding in was hacked and stopped on train tracks and then locked the doors.
I figure highway safety standards being what they are, cars today need to be escapable by mechanical means, and I doubt that would go away with autonomous cars, but there are lots of other ways to kill people with a car. Drive the car full speed on a highway and steer it into a bridge support for example.
All it takes is a hack to be found in one brand of car's autonomous systems to cause a lot of problems.
But pranksters can also cause havoc by putting a fake stop sign in the middle of a block in the middle of the night. And how will autonomous cars react to optical illusion art like that fake archway? There are some street artists who make quite realistic looking sidewalk chalk art. The optical system of the car sees the world very differently than we do, but there are some very technically savvy artists out there who could figure out what would mess with autonomous sensors and create some kind of art that wouldn't fool a human, but would tie an autonomous system into knots.
Eventually the only way around the hackers may be to map the drivable world down to the centimeter and all cars need to access the database. It would probably require governments or some kind of industry body to do the work and everyone would have access to the same data. I believe Elon has also talked about putting up a fleet of new GPS satellites that would be much more accurate than current commercial GPS systems and cars would know exactly where they are in the lane from GPS data.
The coming thing is 3D NAND SSD drives. Currently the largest available is 2 TB, but 8-10TB will be along soon. Cars might all need huge drives to hold all the data by the time they are done.
I've worked in real time and embedded software development most of my career. Full autonomous driving is a major undertaking. Quite possibly the most complex mass market software project ever accomplished. Getting to a system that works well 80% of the time is already giving Tesla fits, but it's the last 20% that's going to be the real challenge. Dealing with fake signs, street art, street signs that are painted over, other drivers doing unexpected things.
And to be truly autonomous, it needs redundancy, and needs to be right 100% of the time. In aerospace critical decision making systems have three different processors running three different programs all written to the same specification (by different teams). When a decision needs to be made, all three processors crunch the problem and all three should come to the same conclusion, but the best two out of three wins. That's fantastically expensive to do, not just from a hardware point of view, but you also need three teams of programmers, and a ton of testing before going live. When I was at Boeing, I worked in a lab that did that kind of testing. My organization just made the test equipment and test software suites, other people did the actual testing. For the 777 program we went from a small part of a building in Renton to a massive building at Boeing Field and we filled the new building completely. It was 1/4 mile from my desk to the lab and I never left the building.
Thinking about how to do autonomous cars makes my head spin. It is doable with current technology, but it isn't an easy task to tackle.
