Ford Has An Idea For An Autonomous Police Car That Could Find A Hiding Spot (jalopnik.com) 115
Ford has submitted a patent application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for an autonomous police car that could function "in lieu of or in addition to human police officers." From a report: Now, companies always file patents for technology that may never get made, but an autonomous police cruiser seems like the logical conclusion to the development self-driving cars. But damn is it weird to read about. The patent, describes how the hypothetical car would rely on artificial intelligence and use "on-board speed detection equipment, cameras, and [it would] communicate with other devices in the area such as stationary speed cameras."
They only missed one obvious thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
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And then what? Politely ask the suspect to get in the car?
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And then what? Politely ask the suspect to get in the car?
It's armed, of course. Maybe with webbing immobilization stuff (sure ... )
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This would absolutely be about catching speeders.
You know the police motto now..."To Collect and Server..."
I'd MUCH rather the police be working *real* crimes like a bunch of gang members driving 10mph looking to commit a drive by shooting, rather than worrying that much if Mr. Jones is going 10mph over the limit to get to work to earn a living and pay taxes....
I'd bet, if you took the money out of the equation, you'd find just exactly how little catching speeders is con
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What was "To Collect and Serve".
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I read "To Collect and Sever". Sounded aggressive.
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Self driving police cars that park and hide somewhere, with no bored officers inside, will have a detrimental effect on the sales of donuts.
New Executive Order: make self driving police cars be powered by donuts. Lots and lots of donuts. Nice, beautiful donuts. The best donuts. Trust me! Beautiful, classy, donuts. And believe me, I know my donuts. Honest.
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Partnering with Roomba, Google (Score:2)
Ford could partner with Roomba to 'clean up' blighted neighborhoods and provide security theater in more affluent neighborhoods.
Ford could also partner with Google to provide Live up-to-the-minute Street View updates for subsequent off-line analysis for crimes and offenses.
In other news... (Score:2)
... Ford tries to raise its share price by making fatuous announcements using flavour-of-the-month automated car meme.
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They would have gotten more mileage by patenting blockchain in the infotainment system.
STOP HYPOTHETICAL PATENTS! (Score:1)
It's not an invention if it doesn't exist! The patent office should reject it!
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Ideas aren't patentable you fucking moron.
Inventions are patentable. Ideas aren't.
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Ideas aren't patentable you fucking moron.
Inventions are patentable. Ideas aren't.
I am pretty sure that an invention that exists only in your head - has no demonstrated embodiment - is called an "idea".
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yes, exactly.
and even an invention isn't automatically patentable. It also has to be novel and non-obvious.
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Either service the machines or become fuel for their operation. Your choice. Be as creative as you want in choosing. You have ten seconds to decide.
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"What you should be patenting is a flying police car."
Prior art.
Flying police cars are called police helicopters.
Autonomous flying police cars are called police drones.
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And people wonder why the US has dropped off the list of most innovative countries. [bigthink.com]
How will they find them? (Score:2)
I'm picturing police cars that leave the station parking lot and drive to where they can hide. ;)
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Ahh, but autonomous mobile donut shops can solve this . . . :)
hawk
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...prevent cases where prisoners gain access to the driving compartment of squad cars and escape, overpower/kill the cops...
Are these cases common? My attempts at finding examples are turning up little. A couple of tragic bus incidents and a case from '89 where somebody got in the back seat with a gun.
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...prevent cases where prisoners gain access to the driving compartment of squad cars and escape, overpower/kill the cops...
Are these cases common? My attempts at finding examples are turning up little. A couple of tragic bus incidents and a case from '89 where somebody got in the back seat with a gun.
It's not terribly common, looks like maybe 1-2 times a year based on my Google search.
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>Are these cases common?
Gosh, you must not watch enough television.
About weekly during primetime.
Not quite as common as jumping out the perpetually unguarded fire escape because all the cops, once again, came in the front door . . . :)
hawk
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Photo radar, anyone? (Score:2)
If you are going to cut out the police officer from the equation, why bother making it so complicated?
And in jurisdictions where photo radar can't be implemented because of legal restrictions, the same factors that make photo radar illegal would also outlaw automated police cars.
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Are we suddenly going to run out of people that drive cars and trucks?
We're not going to run out, but I'm sure we can find something else for the US's 3.5 million truck drivers to do once we automate them away. Maybe we'll have them mine coal or manufacture buggy whips.
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I remember when my company got a big SAP system sold to us (An SAP salesman infiltrated our leadership) and we were told, "well, it's not supposed to meet your business needs, you are supposed to change your business practices to conform to SAP". And the executives like this, because it meant our system would be just like everyone else's at the cocktail party -- no more questions or embarrassment.
Self-driving cars could easily go the same way, with politicians forcing us to conform to the limited capabilit
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50 years ago, we hadn't landed on the moon yet.
30 years ago, the first smartphone hadn't been invented yet.
Hell, 10 years ago, home use 3D printing wasn't really a thing
Are there a lot of technological hurdles to overcome before we have good self-driving cars? Ones that even your grandma feels safe using? Sure.
But to say, flat out, that we're never going to reach it is asinine.
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Actually, I don't have an iPhone. I refuse to buy one... but I digress.
No, progress is not inevitable. But we're not at the end of it yet either. There are self-driving cars now. Are they great? Not really. And we're probably never going to have autonomous Formula-1 racing. But progress is being made in the field.
Sure, if there was only one company looking at self-driving cars, then it would be much less likely to happen in the short or long term. But there's more than one company looking at it. And competi
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Re:Autonomous cars (Score:4, Funny)
You are really, and truly, an idiot.
Why do you keep banging on about Moore's Law? Do you even know what it is? It says nothing about computing performance or technological progress. All it says is how many transistors can be crammed on a die. There is a lower lower limit to how big a transistor can be since you can't make it smaller than the electrons that flow through it.
This just means that future advances will be in different avenues. 3D chips, multi-core systems, optical interconnects, efficient thermal usage. All of these things are being developed today. Some of them won't pan out. Some of them will.
You are not even a Luddite. At least they admit that technology will progress as much as they dislike it. You are like the living embodiment of the argument from ignorance. "Progress won't happen because I can't figure out how it could!" Maybe you can't figure it out because you are an idiot. Did that ever occur to you?
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No no, its impossible to have better idiots because of Moore's Law!
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All it says is how many transistors can be crammed on a die. There is a lower lower limit to how big a transistor can be since you can't make it smaller than the electrons that flow through it.
No.
Moore's Law is about the *cost* per transistor and it does not matter how the cost per transistor decreases. The semiconductor dies may be larger, multiple semiconductor dies may be packaged together, or the transistors may be made smaller. The decrease in cost per transistor may even come at the expense of transistor performance which has happened several times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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...we're probably never going to have autonomous Formula-1 racing.
It seems to me that track racing would be a great application for autonomous driving. Response time, optimized acceleration/braking, few distractions, etc. What makes you think it would be so much tougher than navigating traffic?
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While it's true that Moore's law is, essentially, dead this doesn't mean that computation can't get more powerful. There are lots of well known ways that would work. Most of them, however, require redesigning the algorithms. There's already been a lot of push into parallelizing things, but there could be a **LOT** more. There hasn't been because it was cheaper to rely on Moore's law.
FWIW, I think that the push into complex processor designs was a mistake. It lead to a local optimum that is quite far fr
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While it's true that Moore's law is, essentially, dead this doesn't mean that computation can't get more powerful. There are lots of well known ways that would work. Most of them, however, require redesigning the algorithms. There's already been a lot of push into parallelizing things, but there could be a **LOT** more. There hasn't been because it was cheaper to rely on Moore's law.
FWIW, I think that the push into complex processor designs was a mistake. It lead to a local optimum that is quite far from the global optimum. What should be done is LOTS of simple processors, each with a SMALL cache of fast memory, and a much larger cache of persistent memory (so that it doesn't consume power and dissipate heat). The different CPUs should communicate via message passing and be programmed in a language that is adapted to this kind of computing. I'm thinking of something like the Erlang virtual machine implemented in hardware. If my guesses are correct, this design should be low enough in heat dissipation that 3D circuits are feasible without excessive work on head dissipation. It probably wouldn't even need water cooling.
This design is "sort of" like the ideas being floated for neural computers that keep showing up on the front pages, but I can't tell whether it's the same or not, because the descriptions are always so vague. They usually talk about "memristor" or some such, but that's just a particular technology that can be used to give non-volatile memory. IIUC any other non-volatile approach would work as well...though core memory would take up too much space, and that would slow things down.
The PS3 was built using this type of "cell processor" technology and they ran into performance problems. Granted, most were due to the underlying design, but some were due to the fact that scaling and the increase in delay as you get further away from the center is an issue. I'm not pretending to be an expert on CPU design, but the point is that there probably are fundamental issues with this type of processor that needs to be overcome.
http://www.redgamingtech.com/s... [redgamingtech.com]
My bet is that quantum processors or
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It's true that the communications will eat up speed, but the parallel execution will increase it. So you need to redesign the algorithms to optimize things differently. You can't use the same algorithms for this design and get good performance. But for most problems you can use different algorithms and do so.
Note that I talked about using something like the Erlang virtual machine as the machine language. You don't design things the same way for that kind of a machine. Hell, you couldn't even design thi
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Hardly,
Machine learning is just now starting to re-catch up to our current processing power. Metal neural networks still have a lot of catching up to do and we're making new progress with sensors every day.
If you've done nothing wrong, no reason to hide (Score:4, Insightful)
So why do they need to hide? What are they hiding? What are they afraid of?
Isn't the whole point of policing to increase public safety? Isn't the point of enforcing the speed limits to increase public safety? If a visible police presence is seen on a roadway, that alone will deter most drivers from speeding. The stupidest drivers who speed anyway will then get ticketed for speeding.
Police might object that the number of tickets they write would diminish. But isn't that the whole point? If you think that ticketing is a source of revenue then you've already gone down the wrong side of a slippery slope that leads to all kinds of crooked behavior by police. Next police start to think that all sorts of crime should lead to revenue. Lesser and lesser infractions lead to assets seized until at least no crime is needed at all to justify just robbing people for no reason. And this already happens in some places. Police will stop and rob people who have done nothing wrong except for merely being out of state. Seize their money and send them on their way.
Writing tickets is not a goal in and of itself. The goal is to get people to stop speeding. Not to raise money. If a visible police presence stops most speeders, then the job is being done on a better and larger scale than not being able to ticket every single speeder. Hiding is a sign that police ARE doing something shameful and wrong.
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Or it's an attempt to create an overall sense that the driver can never entirely know they are not being observed, meaning that behaviour changes in areas that aren't so obviously policed.
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Speed limits are set at retard level in many parts of the US, the goal is obviously to write tickets on demand.
Most drivers in my neck of the woods are retards anyway. So... Are you making the case that speed limits are appropriately set?
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If officers must be visible to enforce traffic law, then you find bad drivers will only comply with traffic law when t
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If officers must be visible to enforce traffic law, then you find bad drivers will only comply with traffic law when they can't see a cop.
If officers prefer hiding to catch speeders, selection bias says they will prioritize roads where it's easier to hide and drivers tend to drive faster for enforcement. They will not use crash data or safety enhancement criteria.
Cops shouldn't run speed traps based on the idea that people are driving faster and it's easier for them to hide. They should bias enforcement to areas that have bonafide data suggesting those roads have more accidents or safety problems.
Cops end up enforcing speed laws on roads wh
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Actually, at least according to the local community newspaper... cops here focus enforcement based on public complaints, because that's how the Police Board rolls and they tend not to keep a Chief that won't do the same.
But that's just my experience in Southern Ontario, Canada. YMMV.
Ideally, yes, I'd love to see the process directed by someone with an understanding of road safety and statistics rather than where cops find 'good spots' to fill their quota or where some nuisance has managed to pester the Chi
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All traffic fines, parking tickets, non-compliance fines, court-imposed fines, late fees for payments to governments, and other penalties collected by the government should go into a specific fund. These are payments for crimes agains
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Agreed. When police activity leads directly to additional revenue to the police department then we do not have a system that is "prone to corruption" we have a system that is already institutionalized corruption. As any economist can tell you - organizations respond to financial incentives. The departments actions and decisions will be largely driven by what increases revenue.
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How will they deal source code and calibration log (Score:2)
How will they deal with source code and calibration log requests? as if they can't give them our or the calibration has not been done in a log time that ticket get's dismissed
Robocop! (Score:2)
Precursor to ED-209 (Score:2)
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THIS IS NOT A FUCKING INVENTION (Score:2)
IT IS A FUCKING WISHLIST
Inventions are patentable.
Wishlists and vague descriptions of features are not. At best, they can be prior art preventing the patenting of an actual invention some time in the future.
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Well, there's this advantage:
Patents still expire. This thing will be declared invalid if challenged, and if not challenged will expire without being renewed, and can then be used as prior art to challenge some other patent.
On one condition (Score:2)
As long as the car talks with a sarcastic tone and is a Pontiac Firebird.
It's only a glitch (Score:2)
I cannot wait for the New Detroit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Psalm 10, v. 8 - 9 (Score:2)
He lies in wait near the villages;
from ambush he murders the innocent.
His eyes watch in secret for his victims;
like a lion in cover he lies in wait.
He lies in wait to catch the helpless;
he catches the helpless and drags them off in his net.
No need for autonomous police cars (Score:2)
Then there will be no need for autonomous police cars as outlined in the patent request.
Some simple code that detects if a driver takes over manual control of an autonomous cars and breaks any driving laws, the autonomous car simple locks the doors and drives to the closest police station.
It all becomes self policing.
Autonomous fire engines and police cars will be needed, but will be used to quickly navigate the streets at safe high speeds.
Remember, o
Hiding Spot (Score:2)
So it can autonomously park behind Lil' John's cocktail lounge. Big deal. Our cops have been doing that for years.
Patents are out of control (Score:1)
KARR (Score:1)
Robots will take cryptocurrency no doubt (Score:2)
The automation of highway robber-like behavior continues apace.
It's bad enough much human interaction amounts to throwing money at people until they go away, the bulk of "Hell is other people", but now we have to throw money at robots until they go away, laying the takings at the feet of their masters?
Advantage over speed camera? (Score:2)
Perhaps there is an advantage over speed camera, but it is not obvious.
There is a huge drawback: a police car without policeman will be a nice target for vandalism
"No you don't, Kloog" (Score:2)
Ron Goulart, "Into the Shop" I read it in 1970 (or 1964?) in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but since this topic keeps coming up, I bought myself a (used) copy of his book "What's become of Screwloose? and other Inquiries", where the story was reprinted. (The book has a stamp from the Seton Catholic High School. Gotta love those Jesuits, or whatever brand of Catholic bought this.) The story should be required reading for anybody who proposes this kind of nonsense.