Speeding Ticket Robots — Laws As Algorithms 400
An anonymous reader writes "As the age of autonomous cars and drone surveillance draws nearer, it's reasonable to expect government to increasingly automate enforcement of traffic laws. We already deal with red light cameras, speed limit cameras, and special lane cameras. But they aren't widespread, and there are a host of problems with them. Now, Ars reports on a group of academics who are attempting to solve the problem of converting simple laws to machine-readable code. They found that when the human filter was removed from the system, results became unreasonable very quickly. For example, if you aren't shy about going 5 mph over the limit, you'll likely break the law dozens of times during an hour of city driving. On the freeway, you might break it continuously for an hour. But it's highly unlikely you'd get more than one ticket for either transgression. Not so with computers (PDF): 'An automated system, however, could maintain a continuous flow of samples based on driving behavior and thus issue tickets accordingly. This level of resolution is not possible in manual law enforcement. In our experiment, the programmers were faced with the choice of how to treat many continuous samples all showing speeding behavior. Should each instance of speeding (e.g. a single sample) be treated as a separate offense, or should all consecutive speeding samples be treated as a single offense? Should the duration of time exceeding the speed limit be considered in the severity of the offense?' One of the academics said, 'When you're talking about automated enforcement, all of the enforcement has to be put in before implementation of the law—you have to be able to predict different circumstances.'"
I'll just go ahead and take the metro (Score:5, Funny)
rather than risk a speeding ticket every clock cycle.
My #1 feature request from car makers (Score:5, Funny)
And it's trivially easy to implement. You know how newer cars will beep if the seatbelt isn't engaged, and other examples of trying to correct driver behavior?
Society needs one of those to nag people who don't use turn signals. Make it so.
Re:I'll just go ahead and take the metro (Score:5, Funny)
rather than risk a speeding ticket every clock cycle.
So you, for one, do not welcome our new robotic speeding ticket issuing overlords?
Re:I'll just go ahead and take the metro (Score:3, Funny)
robots.txt
Re:My #1 feature request from car makers (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, I think all cars should come with adaptive cruise control with pedestrian detection. So make of it what you will.
So the car speeds up when it detects a pedestrian?
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