alt Hacker NewsI’m actually surprised whenever someone familiar with technology thinks that adding more “smart” controls to a mechanical device is a good idea, or even that it will work as intended.
The imagined ideal of a smart gun that perfectly identifies the user, works every time, never makes mistakes, always has a fully charged battery ready to go, and never suffers from unpredictably problems sounds great to a lot of people.
But as a person familiar with tech, IoT, and how devices work in the real world, do you actually think it would work like that?
“Sorry, you cannot fire this gun right now because the server is down”.
Or how about when the criminals discover that they can avoid being shot by dressing up in police uniforms, fooling all of the smart guns?
A very similar story is the idea of a drink driving detector in every vehicle. It sounds good when you imagine it being perfect. It doesn’t sound so good when you realize that even a 99.99% false positive avoidance means your own car is almost guaranteed lock you out of driving it some day by mistake during its lifetime, potentially when you need to drive it for work, an appointment, or even an emergency due to a false positive.
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> The imagined ideal of a smart gun that perfectly identifies the user, works every time, never makes mistakes, always has a fully charged battery ready to go, and never suffers from unpredictably problems sounds great to a lot of people.
People acccept that regular old dumb guns may jam, run out of ammo, and require regular maintenance. Why are smart ones the only ones expected to be perfect?
> “Sorry, you cannot fire this gun right now because the server is down”.
Has anyone ever proposed a smart gun that requires an internet connection to shoot?
> Or how about when the criminals discover that they can avoid being shot by dressing up in police uniforms, fooling all of the smart guns?
People already do this.
Sure; api.anthropic.com is not a mechanical device.
> Or how about when the criminals discover that they can avoid being shot by dressing up in police uniforms, fooling all of the smart guns?
Dressing up in police uniforms is illegal in some jurisdictions (like Germany).
And you might say 'Oh, but criminals won't be deterred by legality or lack thereof.' Remember: the point is to make crime more expensive, so this would be yet another element on which you could get someone behind bars. Either as a separate offense, if you can't make anything else stick or as aggravating circumstances.
> A very similar story is the idea of a drink driving detector in every vehicle. It sounds good when you imagine it being perfect. It doesn’t sound so good when you realize that even a 99.99% false positive avoidance means your own car is almost guaranteed lock you out of driving it some day by mistake during its lifetime, potentially when you need to drive it for work, an appointment, or even an emergency due to a false positive.
So? Might still be a good trade-off overall, especially if that car is cheaper to own than one without the restriction.
Cars fail sometimes, so your life can't depend on 100% uptime of your car anyway.
> Or how about when the criminals discover that they can avoid being shot by dressing up in police uniforms. . .
Sadly, we’re already past this point in the US.
Never thought about this before but we already have biometric scanners on our phones we rely on and work quite well, why couldn’t it work for guns?