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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3756 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Should your robot driver kill you to save a child's life?

Absolutely - thus the proliferation of dashcams and with them, hilarious .gifs of Russians faking traffic accidents. Because if you have documentation of it, you can prove it was deliberate.

Thing of it is, a Google car kicks the shit out of a dashcam. All the collision avoidance sensors, the LIDAR, any sort of video, they're all streaming. And LIDAR takes up a lot less data than video. If I were Google, I'd set it to cache several minutes worth of data in RAM and then, if any sensor registered an anomalous event of any kind I'd write that shit to memory and upload it to the mothership. I mean, Google is going to be in the business of wanting to know about unknown potholes and shit in the road, not just fraud-minded jumpers.

And they're Google. They could be emailing you a fully-rendered Sketchup flythrough of the accident scene in 3D space, raw LIDAR traces helpfully ghosted over the map, GPS coordinates accurate to the inch, timestamped to within 40 nanoseconds of the NIST atomic clock before you finish dialing 911.

Which is another ethical issue to consider: Google is going to have lots of data about you and they'll analyze the shit out of it whether you personally need it or not. As far as our fraudster, though, the last car you want to go toe to toe with in court is gonna be a self-driving car.





thundara  ·  3756 days ago  ·  link  ·  

100% agree, except:

    If I were Google, I'd set it to cache several minutes worth of data in RAM and then, if any sensor registered an anomalous event of any kind I'd write that shit to memory and upload it to the mothership

If at all manageable, I'd upload 100% if I were Google (Or 0% if I was not). You want big data, "every car on the road" is huge data. Crowd-source street maps (They already do this with cell phones for roads, iirc), plot traffic patterns, study wild-life, get ambulances in the area before an accident even occurs, submit request tickets to cities to alter traffic laws where the traction has become a bit too low. A camera on ever corner is both a sci-fi writer's and data scientist's dream.

Even if they just took the position of selling (or opening) that data, that's A+ value to a business trying to pick out the next site to expand their offices / restaurants / outlets.

kleinbl00  ·  3755 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'd expect some thinning, but yeah, that's about the gist of it.