Hacker Cinema
Solar Crisis
1992 · Film · 112 min
Directed by Richard C. Sarafian, Alan Smithee
A huge solar flare is predicted to fry the Earth. Astronauts aboard the spaceship Helios must go to the Sun to drop a bomb equipped with an Artificial Intelligence and a Japanese pilot at the right time so the flare will point somewhere else.
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4 comments on Hacker News
> There was a movie...
I'm pretty sure there is an early scene in the movie Solar Crisis[1] that plays out similarly to what you're describing. This movie was on one of the cable movie channels when I was growing up, so I got a higher-than-normal dose of it.
I don't remember a cow, though (but then this probably isn't the only sci-fi movie out there with such a scene). I think one of the characters first parked a motorcycle in the road, but the truck plowed through it. After that, they stood in the road instead, and that caused the truck to screech to a stop right in front of them, blasting a message on a PA about how they were breaking the law by impeding it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Crisis_(film)
He was a designer for the 1990 movie Solar Crisis, and you can see a lot of the elements that he used earlier in Blade Runner.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100649/
The movie Solar Crisis already covered this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i729rZWTmDo#t=30m22s
This was actually a plot point in a little-known B-grade sci-fi movie called "Solar Crisis". There were stretches of highway far from cities with very little traffic aside from the occasional robotic cargo truck, which were implied to have been programmed to stop if any living thing were encountered blocking the road. Gangs of robbers would steal cargo from trucks in isolated areas by tying a cow to a stake in the middle of the road, causing the robotic truck would come to a stop in front of the cow while playing a recorded voice that shouted to "clear the highway". There is a scene where some characters are riding in the back of one of these automated cargo trucks and then have to escape some of these robbers.
The implication is that if some of our roads gradually become devoid of humans, robbing automated vehicles will become a "thing". It doesn't actually sound that far fetched, really. It would presumably be safer for the crooks than robbing a real truck today for three reasons: 1) they wouldn't have to threaten a human (thus lowering the stakes if they get caught), 2) the trucks likely would not be built to shoot back (think of the potential liability for the trucking company if it were), 3) the trucking companies would likely not put much energy into pursuing the criminals, so long as the losses were small in the grand scheme of things.
It's similar to the notion of people shooting down delivery drones and stealing the packages. People will do it, and it will likely be tolerated to some small degree. Even today we already have people stealing packages off doorsteps, although there is occasionally vigilante justice in those cases:
http://noevalleysf.blogspot.com/2012/11/crime-beat-suspected-package-thief.html