Opinion | What if Your Waymo or Tesla Hallucinates?

Is there a self-driving car equivalent of a ChatGPT hallucination. Like, are there scenarios where the car just does something and you don’t know why it did it. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you can find videos on YouTube, if you’ve got the stomach for it, of Tesla, because they’ve got the most sophisticated driver-assist systems, where it’s just moving along in the lane, then does a hard left and goes right off through opposing traffic. But right off the road. And you struggle in vain to know what possibly encouraged it to do that. So it does happen. Just like hallucinations with ChatGPT. They’re getting better all the time, but it’s not perfect. And in terms of security. So how much, like, fears of terrorism, for instance. Right? Someone who used superintelligent A.I. to hack into Waymo’s system would presumably have the capacity to take over hundreds or thousands of cars at once, right? Just in terms of scenarios that people are reasonably afraid of. So in that scenario, yeah, certainly the advent of L.L.M.s means that we’ve unleashed superhacking. The two points to make are: One, you’d have to hack — you couldn’t control every car, you’d have to hack into every one. And as previously mentioned, the car is driving itself. So you’d need to find a very sophisticated way to confuse the car about its environment. I’m no technical expert, I think it could be done, but I think it would be really hard to do. Which means the second point, which is: In the language of security, Waymo is a hard target. They’ve got all this cybersecurity behind them. If I was a bad actor, America’s power grids, America’s utilities, there are so many softer targets out there where you can do more havoc with less effort. I’m not going to say more. – That’s true. – I don’t want to give anyone ideas. No, that’s — well, we don’t want to sketch out, you know, terrorist plans on this show. But I do think there’s a connection to these psychological elements that I’m interested in where the idea of having the automobile you’re in be taken over is because it’s unfamiliar and novel and tied to personal privacy and personal control. In a way, it just seems like a more terrorizing act than a blackout. And people have lived through blackouts before. The opening of the new “Naked Gun” movie features a murder committed with a self-driving car as the weapon. There’s a long history of this in our popular culture. This is an obvious place where our fears go to. So you’re on to something that this is weird and strange, but in a way that triggers us to be afraid.