Will driverless vehicles be used for crime?

This concern arises from a report written by the intelligence department of the FBI, in preparation for the introduction of autonomous cars to the market

Every time a world-class technology appears to have the potential to succeed, the voices of the seers of blackness and the prophets of wrath rise. These predict that the new technology has no chance of success, at best, or that it will endow humans with extreme abilities that were not meant to be in their hands. If we had listened to them, we would have known that "there is a market in the world for only five computers" (Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943), that "television will not be able to persist in the market... People will soon tire of staring into a wooden box every night" (Daryl Zanuck, an executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946) and that "the Internet will explode like a supernova and collapse catastrophically in 1996" (Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995).

Each of the aforementioned prophets and prophets had good reasons at the time to say what they said. In Watson's day, the computer was not yet able to run games for example, and was limited to calculations that served giant companies and governments only. Who would have dreamed that within fifty years, individuals would also be interested in performing these types of calculations in their homes? But the world has changed, and with it the demands and expectations from technology. Humans got used to staring at wooden boxes that provided them with accessible and cheap entertainment on a level that didn't exist before, and the technicians behind the Internet succeeded in thwarting the hardware and software failures to prevent a collapse.

These predictions mainly teach us how difficult it is to predict a future that relies on world-changing technologies that will change the ways of thinking and acting used today. A new report by the FBI now demonstrates how the American investigative agency is trying to deal impressively with the challenge. And the result? Dire warnings that Google's autonomous (self-driving) cars could be used as "lethal weapons" - but also an overview that reviews the benefits of the cars and the ways they could change the game for law enforcement as well.

The report was written by the intelligence department of the FBI, with the intention of preparing for the entry of autonomous cars into the market. This is an internal report, but the Guardian magazine managed to get its hands on it, and we are forced to learn about the content of the report from the selected quotes that the magazine Advertise online. It is clear from the content that the agents who wrote the report understand the technologies in question, and put themselves in the minds of the criminals in an attempt to decipher how they will use them. The result? A list of crimes that can be committed with autonomous vehicles in the near future.

So if you've always been looking for what to do with your autonomous vehicle, here are some suggestions from the agency (the blog does not take responsibility for the use!)

• Loading explosives on the vehicles and thus creating mobile bombs that are remotely controlled.
• Breaking into vehicles to order them to ignore stop signs, traffic lights or speed limits on the roads.
• Using the car as a getaway vehicle without a driver, while shooting at the police officers.

The task facing the authors of the report was particularly challenging, since it requires them to try to imagine how the world will look in ten years, when the autonomous vehicles will enter the private market. As you understood from the other failed predictions, any prediction that tries to deal with world-changing technologies without understanding how they will change the world around them is doomed to failure. These technologies are also known among economists as General Purpose Technologies, and the economist and historian Gavin Wright defined them as "profound new techniques or ideas, which have the potential to have an important impact on many sectors of the economy."[1] These include the steam engine and the electric engine, the radio and the Internet, and probably also the autonomous vehicles.

Anyone who is familiar with the scene of autonomous vehicles and is aware of the capabilities they should have in a decade, understands that the traffic system of the future will not remain the same as it is today. There are estimates that in the big cities the personal cars will be replaced by a system of driverless taxis, controlled remotely by a central computer. In fact, there is a hypothesis according to which the cities themselves will ban the entry of cars that cannot switch to autonomous control, in order to avoid traffic jams or uncontrolled parking. In each of these situations the overall transportation system changes. The meaning of the change is not 'only' that the autonomous cars are added to the roads, but that the whole world is changing to adapt itself to the autonomous cars.

The FBI also predicts that law enforcement will change along with the world. The agency predicts that the number of traffic accidents will decrease, and therefore there will also be less need for police services. On the other hand, when the police get their own autonomous cars, they will be able to carry out particularly smart pursuits of criminals. According to the report, the autonomous vehicles will be able to safely make sharp turns and other impressive maneuvers during chases or arriving at an emergency. Of course, human police officers can also perform these types of stunts, but due to being human, they are likely to commit more accidents.

The authors of the report continue and point out one of the most important points for understanding the world of the future: the supervision and monitoring of criminals' cars will be easier and more efficient than ever before. The cameras and transmitters will be everywhere - perhaps even inside civilian vehicles, including the criminals' vehicles - and the future autonomous police cars will be able to share information with each other in real time to find the wanted vehicle in a short period of time. From the moment the criminal vehicle is located, it will not be possible to lose it, in practice. The cars will be able to move like bees in the city hive, and even turn in lanes that are not intuitive at first glance, in order to flank the fleeing vehicle and stop it further down the road.

When will all these good things come true? According to the FBI's predictions in the report, the autonomous vehicles will be approved for driving on the roads within five to seven years from now. The infrastructure surrounding the vehicles will take longer to change - perhaps decades - but it is clear that some of the benefits of the autonomous vehicles will begin to be realized in the next decade.

It's going to be a fascinating world, a monitored world, a safer world - and a world that law enforcement agencies need to prepare for, to understand how to deal with a future in which the work of policing the roads changes from end to end.

Good luck to the Israel Police.