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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

They manage to climb in, they OD/go into arrest, cant climb out.

What then? So the uber now has to either get a person or take that car to a hospital - how do they know to do such?

So is uber running a massive call center that watches every driverless ride and monitors the situation?

Are they monitoring if people get into a fight in the car?

That actually happened to me, where I took an uber pool, and the two other riders got into a physical fist fight in the car and the driver had to pull into a gas station and kick them out.

How to monitor a potential rape? How to monitor unless your watching literally every ride.

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> So the uber now has to either get a person or take that car to a hospital - how do they know to do such?

It does? Why? What if the person passed out in their own, manually driven car? Would you expect that car to automatically call an ambulance?

Just because you theoretically could have some kind of elaborate system that detects when the user falls unconscious and carries them to the hospital, doesn't mean that's _required_.

> Are they monitoring if people get into a fight in the car?

No. Why would they be? What makes you think that's necessary?

They will have to handle the case where the passenger doesn't exit the vehicle somehow or another. But the fact that it is occurring in an automated vehicle shouldn't make anyone worse off.

Ya, this sounds like an easy problem to solve.

If the passenger doesn't exit the vehicle after a set time, start a video call to a support central (perhaps the person is unable to get out because the doors won't unlock? or they fell asleep?) The attendant could then instruct the vehicle to go to a pre-specified location nearby where a human can intervene, call another vehicle or notify the competent authorities.

There are certainly cases where going to another location will be impossible. If the passenger opens the door and does not exit, for example, there is no way to close the door or to move the vehicle.

But I agree with the overall point, while occasional incapacitated passengers or manual intervention may occur, these are not insurmountable problems.

I suggest you do the math on this though since you think its so simple:

Ride is avg $10, vehicle is ~$30,000 satellite uplink is ~1200 per year. BOFH guy watching is ~$65k per year... insurance is ~$2400/ year...

so if we take that, we have an annual cost of (assuming life of care is 3 years) 10000+65000+1200+2400 - so ~80K per year per car... and / BOFH among his volume to monitor N cars....

but we extract the BOFH from the car model.

so we have a per car cost of 15K per year

and we have an avg rider value of 10 per ride, and a ride volume of 1,500 rides per month / BOFHs required / insurance claim / lawsuits

and we can suss out the model pretty well... but there are a lot more inputs.

and if this is going to be a service to public from multi-parties, we'd better understand this model....

and they'd better be standard on the CARNOC

What do you mean why?

This is literally the stupidest response on this thread. Why? Because presume I am paying Ajedi32 to drive me home. So the presumption is that Ajedi32 is responsible for my well being to arrive Home.

So I don’t arrive home. I get dumped on the side of the road or I die in the presumed care of Ajedi32.

Don’t mess around with Your reputation, Ajedi32 because you want to defend stupid ai driving cars, have some self awareness and vision.

Yes, you're paying the car to drive you home. You're not paying the car to monitor your vital signs, or to break up fights between you and another passenger. Those have nothing to do with the car's primary function.

If you were paying me to drive you home you might reasonably expect that I would also do those things, since I'm a human and am therefore capable of performing tasks completely unrelated to the one you're paying me for. But the car isn't a human, and there's no reason you should expect it to behave like one in all respects. (For example, I am also capable of engaging in small talk with you. Would you expect the self driving car to be capable of performing that task, just because I can?)

Basically, if you OD and pass out in the back of a autonomous car, there's no reason to expect the outcome to be any different from if you ODd and passed out in a public restroom. And you wouldn't be justified in blaming the car for that anymore than you'd be justified in blaming the restroom.

These aren't hard questions in the long term though.

Non responsive passenger->follow protocol that emergency services prefers (or even legally requires).

Fist fight->stop car, inform passengers that car won't transport them further.

Rape->turn over recordings of vehicle interior to police.

I suppose for the last one you have to take it as a given that they are making such recordings (probably on a rolling basis), but there you go.

It's not like these situations are any thornier because an automated system is involved. Passed out person is better off with monitoring (at least in health terms), fist fight without car, same difference, rape without monitoring, no video evidence.

> Rape->turn over recordings of vehicle interior to police.

Well, Uber may have some difficulty complying, but I'm sure their competitors will be fine.

I appreciate your calm response.

So, then the idea for a unicorn is that we need a "fitbit for health monitoring while riding in a self driving car" as an app on the apple watch.

No fitbit required. The interiors will have multiple video cameras of the interior. An automated system that flags unusual behavior, then alerts a human would be fine.

For emergencies where the passenger is more responsive, an "onstar"-like emergency button that calls emergency support staff would probably suffice.

I like where this thread is going. If the car is responsible for the passenger and what happens to them inside the car, they could conceivably act as an ambulance. Maybe it could even diagnose you on the way to the hospital.

How do they know you need to be taken to a hospital? They will have internal cameras and when you fail to exit at your destination after being invited 3 times to do so, they will enable that camera and somebody in a remote location might take a look and make a call - or the car might automatically take you to the nearest hospital without even consulting someone if you fail to exit after a timeout.

How to monitor a potential rape? That thing probably has 15 cameras on the outside and might already be saving the footage for law enforcement review. And you actually removed one potential rapist from the scene by not having a driver - sadly this is a real (though thankfully infrequent) issue.

video camera monitored by a machine learning system, which escalates unknown or edge cases to a human dispatcher for a decision.

how many poor outcomes are required to train the MLV on what constitutes shitty situations?

How many lawsuits come from that?

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