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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

Are paramedics/ambulances so unregulated in the US that it's /not/ a bat-shit crazy idea to suggest Uber Ambulances?

Not really. There are plenty of private ambulance services in the US. They generally deal with things like transporting a medically frail person to see a doctor in a different city, things like that. Non emergency, mostly.

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/31/style/private-ambulances-w... (yes, over 30 years old, but most of it still holds true)

Thanks for the link!

I didn't realize there were public ambulance services in the US. When I was hit by a car I was definitely taken to hospital by a private ambulance as an emergency patient.

There are a lot of private ambulance services in the US, they're anything but unregulated though as you'd expect with anything in the US medical field (one of the most regulated industries on earth).

There's no theoretical reason why Uber couldn't get into the driving side of the business, with human drivers. Their future is in autonomous however, which will never be the ambulance business (it will never be autonomous, ambulance drivers frequently have to break standard driving laws in emergencies, drive at high speeds, drive around vehicles, etc).

Once automation gets good enough it'll probably be better at it then human drivers (imagine weaving through traffic, that sort of thing. It would also be able to do things like reroute in real time to avoid congestion.

You'll still need warm bodies in the back for life support, but I see no reason that the human in the front seat can't be replaced by sufficiently advanced technology.

> reroute in real time to avoid congestion.

Hell, in this ideal future where most or all of the rest of traffic is also autonomous, you don't even need to avoid congestion -- you just "phone ahead" along the route to tell any cars in the way to, well, get out of the way. As long as you don't have standstill traffic (which might actually be something you can eliminate as a general rule with a fully-autonomous, networked fleet), you're fine.

> It will never be autonomous, ambulance drivers frequently have to break standard driving laws in emergencies, drive at high speeds, drive around vehicles, etc).

And because they have to perform emergency medical treatment, right?!

Are we talking about different things - a mini hospital on wheels staffed by highly trained paramedics, and glorified taxis for the elderly/non-critical?

Even a gloried taxi will likely need the human touch if you will for people who might need assistance.

Some ambulances are just glorified taxis, others are staffed with EMTs who can do more.

If it weren't for the need to drive in a "non-standard" manner, you could likely save on costs by having an autonomous vehicle staffed by an EMT. The EMT can't also drive the vehicle, after all.

Never is a really strong word, especially when you italicize it.

> Their future is in autonomous however, which will never be the ambulance business (it will never be autonomous, ambulance drivers frequently have to break standard driving laws in emergencies, drive at high speeds, drive around vehicles, etc).

None of these are reasons for ambulances to not be autonomous. If you accept that most other vehicles will be fully autonomous, ambulances do not require anything further extraordinary to also be autonomous. The vehicles on the road would likely be networked, at least within a nexus of proximity, and move out of the way of the ambulance so it could speed past them.

NB: I’m not saying ambulances will be autonomous. I’m just saying that if everything else is, the ambulances have no significant (technical) obstacle for also being autonomous either. A significant theoretical advantage of fully autonomous vehicles is not simply that the modal vehicle is safer than a human, but that a networked and autonomous fleet is hyper-efficient and hyper-aware as a hive mind.

It is very problematic, e.g. how would you develop such a system? No city is going to allow you to break traffic laws to train an autonomous ambulance. At best you could make one for rural areas. I think the problem is probably AI-complete and would require human-like abilities of abstraction to train.

Once autonomous cars become common enough, and we have a common protocol for communicating between them, I'm pretty sure the cities will be ok with it. The autonomous cars could be instructed to move out of the way for an ambulance to come through and/or stop at intersections, which would actually make things much safer for the ambulance.

Shoot, it'd be safer even if the ambulances weren't autonomous - because the cars would be reacting in a predictable manner.

So in a few decades we can start thinking about it.

And things like things needed to keep patient alive and breathing

Nah, there’s certification and usually contracts with municipalities for response to emergencies.

It’s a real mix though... paid fire dapartments, volunteers, and private operators all respond to emergencies.

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