So this is currently possible today: I can walk out on any street today and redirect traffic. With or without my reflective vest, drivers will generally listen to me. And self-driving vehicles must as well.

Note that when I am doing traffic direction with appropriate authority, most drivers will never have heard of the organization I'm a part of (a local CERT team), nor have any real way to vet the authority I have. The authority they can determine I have is mostly that I'm doing it and no police officer has come by to tell me to stop doing it.

(Note that CERT members do not and should not self-deploy, mind you, and if you choose not to heed our directions, we almost certainly can find a cop car to come let you know you screwed up.)

Also bear in mind, many people directing traffic aren't public safety personnel at all. Construction workers are private employees, events have their own staff which direct traffic in various contexts, including public roads.

There's no definitive way to determine that someone is authorized to direct traffic, cars just need to obey them.

Human drivers are smart, and will generally judge your appearance, confidence, and context to determine whether or not your actions are legitimate. And you likely always pass these tests.

Imagine a teenager, dressed in street wear, who jumps into the middle of a street to stop traffic in a way that has no explanation given the scene, while their friends laugh on the sidewalk as they observe.

Or a group of men in masks stopping a car in an alley as their accomplices surround the vehicle.

Any human driver will recognize these scenarios as illegitimate. It isn't just the act of directing traffic that is judged in isolation.

In basically every example you gave, you still have to stop until people move though. The result is the same, despite everything else. The only one that's a bit iffy is if you're being carjacked, is a bit of an exception.

Legitimacy isn't really the problem, it's the circumstance of a human being in front of your car that prevents you from moving forward, and beyond getting out of your car and talking to them, or just waiting, you don't have much of a choice in what options you have.

I agree with the intent of your point, but what's the alternative? You can't just keep driving if someone is standing in the middle of the road.

Those were two examples, but they're not exhaustive. Traffic direction can (and often does) happen without someone blocking the vehicle.

In the case of an illegitimate request, a human driver might question the request and take a different action instead.

Are you being directed to run a red light? If you judge that someone is maliciously asking you to do so, you probably will choose to remain still instead.

Are you being directed to stop? If you judge that someone is maliciously asking you to do so, you may choose to turn around, reverse, turn into a parking lot or otherwise remove your vehicle from the situation. You don't have to run people over to refuse a command to stop.

And if you were completely blocked from moving, you'd probably call the police.

My point is that "always follow hand signals" is trivially problematic. I would expect that if self-driving cars followed any hand signal they saw, you'd see kids doing it for the lulz on the sidewalk in front of their school. ..."traffic jam challenge". After all, someone is less likely to act maliciously towards a human than they are a machine.

Okay, so your point was more about the specific directions being given, than the presence of a person in the road. Overall I agree.

One reason carjacking is rare is because people don't foolishly stop for obvious carjackings. If an autonomous car has trouble telling the difference between a carjacker and a construction worker, then it will be much more likely to get carjacked.

My brother and his teenage friends redirected traffic into their school grounds to prove that they could do it. They also passed all 'sure, looks legit' tests.

Humans aren’t perfect, but their BS detectors are better than nothing.

The more important test scenarios are life threatening or unreasonably disruptive situations rather than harmless pranks.

PKE transmitters given to firefighters with some mechanism to cycle private keys on autodriving taxis weekly.

Nowhere near perfect, but that makes it a lot harder than just getting a spike strip or a hand gun or a demolition derby car. We’re talking about people willing to risk a decade in prison to “do criminal things to a car and/or passengers”. How much work do you think they want to put into disabling a car with a remote? Why not just wave a gun in the driver’s face at a stop light?

>There's no definitive way to determine that someone is authorized to direct traffic, cars just need to obey them.

Exactly! But there still is a way. You don't obey anyone in any circumstances because that would be dangerous. People have a feeling for it, computers don't yet.

I'd obey such traffic commands from just about anybody in plain street clothes, unless they looked obviously crazy or if I was in part of the world where car jacking is common. At the very least I'd stop and ask them what was up. Maybe there is some dangerous condition ahead and they're trying to warn me.

Does the computerized car understand the meaning of the words "Turn back because the bridge is out"?

I miswrote, my meaning wasn’t that I would stop for nobody, but that I wouldn’t stop for just anybody in just any situation.

Essentially the same that you said.

This is something that people are very good at judging but software isn’t.

I’m trying to say that until we have figured out AGI, autonomous cars driving among people are very dangerous.

I bet you’d eyeball it though, right? Like if someone was telling cars to stop, looked nervous, and had a hand in a large enough pocket to hold a gun, I might head in the direction they were sending people (depending on visibility I guess) but I’d probably not slow down.

> Note that when I am doing traffic direction with appropriate authority, most drivers will never have heard of the organization I'm a part of

Reading between the lines it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of communication to emergency services etc on how to deal with autonomous vehicles.

Even the police seem to be operating under misconceptions about what the vehicles can and can’t do.

Isn't it the vehicle operators operating the vehicles while ignoring that there are things that the vehicles must do in certain scenarios to be suitable for operation?

So there's no monolithic entity that handles public safety in any given area. Overlapping jurisdictions of police, fire, public works, utility companies, construction companies, volunteer orgs, etc. all will end up on the streets for different reasons.

If self-driving cars cannot cope with this, they should not be allowed on public roads. Very little has convinced me they should currently be street legal.

>most drivers will never have heard of the organization I'm a part of (a local CERT team)

Will you have to file a CVE after the incident?

As a sysadmin and a volunteer responder, I do find the fact CISA and FEMA each have a CERT program that are completely different things pretty funny.

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