Recent news reports speculate that automotive titan Carlos Ghosn might have made his escape from Japan via hiding inside a large black case that would normally contain audio equipment used at a concert.
This kind of subterfuge seems reminiscent of the Cold War era and spy-versus-spy tactics.
Those of you that are movie buffs might recall the scene in Torn Curtain when Paul Newman and Julie Andrews are hiding inside a box that is being lifted off a boat that has just docked (I won’t say what happens next, so no spoiler alert needed).
In any case, today’s world is so chock full of video cameras that it is becoming increasingly difficult to affect a successful hide-and-escape scheme.
There are video surveillance cameras on rooftops, and on traffic signals, and on the sides of office buildings, and most pedestrians have their smartphone cameras at the ready to snap a pic or grab a video.
It seems if you can’t get your five minutes of fame directly, you can at least capture something worthy of fame via your smartphone camera and then relish the afterglow of doing so.
Even our commonplace doorbells are now adorned with cameras, allowing video footage of anything happening in front of your home and taking place in the nearby street.
Part of the hide-and-escape modus operandi is that you oftentimes need to be spirited from point A to point B, most likely using a car.
Here’s an interesting question: Will the advent of true self-driving cars make it easier or harder to carry out a successful hide-and-escape ploy?
Let’s unpack the matter and see.
The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars
It is important to clarify what I mean when referring to true self-driving cars.
True self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.
These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5, while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).
There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.
Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some point out).
Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).
For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that kids are forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that in spite of those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.
You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.
Self-Driving Cars As An Aid To Hide-And-Escape
For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.
All occupants will be passengers.
The AI is doing the driving.
Voila, the fact that the AI is doing the driving is a crucial element as to why a true self-driving car makes a handy hide-and-escape mechanism.
There isn’t a human driver needed and therefore there isn’t an eyewitness involved in the driving of the getaway car.
Neat!
Not only does this eliminate the eyewitness driver, the aspect that you are using the AI to drive also means that you don’t need to try and find a human driver that’s willing to be in on the secret.
It’s kind of messy to have to bring a human driver into the fold of what is surreptitiously taking place. You might need to pay them extra dough, or worse still they might decide to spill the beans, and so on.
If you decide to use an ordinary driver that’s not informed about the plot, you are at a constant risk that the driver might somehow suspect foul play is underway. The driver might then decide midstream to suddenly stop the car and run away.
Or, the driver might tattle the moment that the car journey has ended.
So, no human driver means no need to cope with an accomplice, either one overtly included or one that was a patsy.
That resolutely deals with the aspect of how the AI helps by taking the human driver out of the spy-versus-spy equation.
But, wait, there’s more.
Would you need to be hidden inside a box, a crate, or some other container?
Not necessarily.
You could potentially enter directly into the self-driving car and then calmly exit when you’ve reached your destination.
Those of you that are budding spies might say that this leaves the person visible during the driving journey and that any commoner on the street might snag a photo of the person (presumably turning in the pic to TMZ), along with capturing the license plates, and the gig would be up.
Well, keep in mind that it is anticipated that the automakers might ultimately get rid of the conventional windows of a car.
This might be done to allow passengers to have complete seclusion inside a self-driving car, plus the inner walls of the car would have large LED displays.
These LED displays enable riders to watch streaming videos as they commute to work or carry on conversations via Facetime-like video interaction with their office mates. If you want to look outside, all you’ll need to do is switch the video feed to the cameras that are already mounted on the self-driving car and you can watch the world around you.
The point is that no one can readily see who is in such a driverless car.
Perfect!
Suppose though that you only have available to you a self-driving car that hasn’t yet switched over to replacing the windows with something non-transparent (or that can’t yet be toggled from transparent to opaque)?
Wear a disguise.
Again, there’s no human driver that can take a close-up look at you and potentially see the make-up and fake beard or wig that you are using.
Furthermore, once inside the self-driving car, you can simply lay down and for the rest of the ride be hidden from prying eyes outside of the driverless car.
In a conventional car with a human driver, you’d probably have a lot of explaining to do if you opted to lay down in the backseat. Maybe claim that you are feeling lightheaded or that your spleen has burst.
For the AI system, there’s no need for you to explain a darned thing.
Just lay down.
And, another bonus about self-driving cars is that they are likely to be equipped to allow people to catch a nap or get some sleep.
The seats in self-driving cars will recline and enable passengers to rest while on their way to work or do so after a tough day at the office. When you reach your home, you’ll feel refreshed and ready to interact with the family and your cherished pet dog and beloved cat.
Hiding inside a driverless car is going to be easy as pie.
All in all, you can expect that you’ll either be inside a self-driving car that provides a feature to prevent being seen inside of the self-driving car, or you can readily lay down, cover yourself with a blanket, and zillions of other people will be doing the same in their self-driving cars too.
Nothing out of the ordinary in an era of true self-driving cars.
We need to add a bonus to the bonus.
If you still felt that there was a chance of being detected while inside the self-driving car, you could presumably ride in the trunk.
Yes, the trunk of the driverless car might be a possibility.
A human driver would certainly question why you are desirous of riding in the trunk. The story you’d need to tell would have to be quite fanciful, perhaps saying that you grew up in a family of contortionists and it relaxes you to be in a confined space.
The AI won’t care.
You request a driverless car, it arrives, you open the trunk as though you are going to put your bags into it, and opt to crawl in.
Next, you instruct the AI to proceed, perhaps doing so on your smartphone and the driverless car heads on the driving journey.
You might be tempted to think that during the driving journey this would catch the eye of passerby that happens to see a driverless car going past them and the self-driving car is completely empty.
Actually, we are going to have lots of driverless cars roaming our streets and being empty a lot of the time.
The notion is that self-driving cars will be continually on the move, rather than being parked, and will be available at a moment’s notice to any passenger that wants a lift. Indeed, I’ve decried the aspect that we might end up with a vast parade of empty driverless cars and this doesn’t seem like a necessarily good thing for mankind (see my link here).
Also, realize that driverless cars are going to be used as delivery vehicles, taking goods from the local grocery to your house, and as such there will be numerous seemingly empty driverless cars on our highways and byways all of the time.
Okay, so you could ride inside a self-driving car and either be hidden from view or if somehow you are viewable you might wear a disguise and there’s nobody else in the driverless car to rat you out.
Getting into the self-driving car is a potential point of being exposed, and likewise getting out of the self-driving car.
Think again about the AI aspects.
The AI won’t have qualms about where you want to be picked-up and nor where you want to be dropped off (as an aside, the drop-off juncture is a difficult question still to be resolved since human drivers tend to use human judgment about the best spot to drop someone off, and the AI isn’t yet at that capability, see the link here).
In short, you can instruct the AI to pick you up at whatever location the driverless car can arrive at, and the same goes for the drop-off point.
Thus, you can arrange for a clandestine spot and the AI will abide by the request.
A human driver would likely start asking pesky questions.
No human driver, no prying questions.
It would seem that a true self-driving car is a godsend for those that might want to hide-and-escape.
Not entirely so.
Self-Driving Cars Defeating Hide-And-Escape
There are some hurdles to using a true self-driving car for your hide-and-escape plots.
First, assuming you don’t own a self-driving car, you’ll need to request one on a ridesharing basis.
Pundits are saying that self-driving cars will only be owned by large corporations and made available via a fleet for ridesharing purposes to the public.
I’m a bit of a contrarian in that I assert that we will still have individual ownership of cars, which logically makes sense since you’ll likely be able to make money by owning a driverless car that you put out for ridesharing when you don’t need to use it (see more at this link here).
Anyway, let’s assume for the moment that for your getaway car you are going to use one that is a ridesharing driverless car.
This means that you’ll need to make a request to the ridesharing network and wait for a driverless car to show-up.
Depending upon whether the timing of your effort needs to be precise, you are now at the vagaries of the ridesharing service.
It might also be the case that you need to provide some form of identification when making the request, and thus need to have a false identity ready to be used.
Not to worry, though, since the odds are that the ridesharing networks won’t especially care about identity and you can readily spoof it or find an easy way around it. Keep in mind that the ridesharing of driverless cars won’t be like going to the airport and having to deal with the TSA.
So, don’t sweat the identity aspects.
Unfortunately, there will be a record of the driverless car going from point A to point B, and this record might someday be used against you in a court of law or be used to ferret out where you are next residing.
Here’s how that works.
For self-driving cars, they will be outfitted with OTA (Over-The-Air) electronic communications.
The OTA will be used to push software updates down into the AI of the driverless car by the automaker or self-driving tech firms. In addition, the self-driving car will pump-up to the cloud the data that’s collected by the driverless car, such as the sensor data from the cameras, LIDAR, radar, and the like.
Thus, your AI self-driving car will be a bit of a tattletale.
Besides capturing a record of your journey, the odds are that driverless cars will have cameras pointed inward too.
The logic of having inward-pointing cameras is that the owners of the self-driving cars will want to make sure that riders don’t trash the interior of the driverless car. By having a camera pointed at the passengers, this might prevent graffiti or at least capture video of those that do such a dastardly thing.
Furthermore, in general, you might purposely want an inward-facing camera so that you can carry on those Skype-like video interactions. When using such a feature to chat with your kids at home, they can see you as you wave at them and smile a reassurance that you’ll certainly help them with their homework when you get home later that night.
Shucks, an inward-facing camera is nearly as bad as having a human driver as a witness.
Nope, not nearly so.
The odds are that some driverless car fleets will allow you to turn off the camera for privacy reasons.
The owner might offer this option to induce you to use their ridesharing driverless cars over their competition. Or, the owner could use this to charge added fees to turn off the camera, allowing the owner to remain competitive on the per-mile price of ridesharing driverless car use and yet still make some added clamshells.
In a worst-case scenario, you could simply cover the inward-facing cameras, and assuming that the system wasn’t the wiser, away you go, scot-free.
Overall, these downsides aren’t insurmountable hurdles.
The real rub involves the chances of getting nabbed while riding inside a driverless car.
Here’s why.
With a human driver, you could potentially tell them to stomp on the gas, as needed, presumably to evade the police or otherwise avoid getting caught.
That’s a no go for the AI.
Most are anticipating that the AI of driverless cars will be programmed to pretty much obey the law.
No speeding.
No wild maneuvers.
If somehow there is a possibility that someone wants to get you, and they know you are inside a self-driving car, you are essentially a sitting duck (for my concerns about carjackings, or known colloquially as robojackings of driverless cars, see this link here).
Via OTA, it would be readily possible to find out from the AI the path of the driving journey that is taking place.
Cops would merely wait at the destination for you to arrive into their waiting hands.
Sweet!
Or, should I say, foiled.
Plus, via the OTA, the driving destination could be altered and take you directly to the police station.
Just in case you might figure out that your ride is being diverted, another possibility would be to have the police meet you along your driving journey. You’d have no apparent way to know that the police were using the OTA and the AI to monitor your driving progress and had found a convenient spot to then rendezvous and arrest you.
There is the possibility too that the police could instruct the self-driving car to come to a halt if perchance they came upon the driverless car while say on the freeway and suspected that you were hiding inside of it (see the link here about ways to stop a self-driving car).
The biggest loophole in the driverless car scheme for hide-and-escape will be that if you are found out or someone tells about your self-driving car journey, you’ve lost the ability to use the car as a getaway vehicle that would use screeching tires and tricky maneuvers to get away from the long arm of the law.
Bonnie and Clyde would not have welcomed true self-driving cars.
Conclusion
Some might be disturbed at this discussion about using driverless cars for undertaking a hide-and-escape jaunt.
Won’t this let crooks know what to do?
Let’s not be naive and think that crooks aren’t going to find ways to try and leverage self-driving cars to their own advantage (for how criminals might use self-driving cars to commit crimes, see the link here).
For those that are willing to simply toss driverless cars into our society and not anticipate the good and foul ways that they will be used, it’s a timeworn approach to bringing new innovations into our culture and by now we ought to be a bit more sophisticated.
Better to anticipate what might occur, even adversely, and prepare for it, rather than take a head-in-the-sand mindset and pretend we are living in a Utopian world.
There are a multitude of ways that the automakers and self-driving tech firms can craft the AI systems to reduce or mitigate criminal acts that might attempt to employ driverless cars, though such anti-crime mechanisms are not necessarily on the priority list since right now the goal is to achieve the already moonshot-like stretch goal of simply having self-driving cars that can take people on everyday driving journeys, doing so safely.
One inherent aspect of the existing approach to the AI driving systems is that there’s little chance of a John Dillinger like means of evading federal agents and driving frenetically away from a crime scene.
Instead, it will be akin to having a driver that wants to come to a full stop at stop signs, won’t run any red lights, and will make sure to stay just under the posted speed limit.
It’s enough to make a grown mobster cry.
