Nissan's Path to Self-Driving Cars? Humans in Call Centers
wired.com
wired.com
I wouldn't be surprised to see an almost-entirely-self-driving car service in certain areas in the nearish future. As long as it's 100% safe and only requires assistance rarely, it makes sense to start building out the infrastructure sooner rather than later.
From a cynical perspective, it's easy to see a future where we constantly approach, but never quite reach, full Level 5 autonomy - or at least not with existing technology. Maybe Level 5 will prove to be an NP problem. Marketing teams are likely going to promote terms like "Level 4.1 self-driving" or "Level 4.5 self-driving" or "Level 4.9 self-driving", as edge-cases are slowly resolved.
"Level 4 ("mind off"): As level 3, but no driver attention is ever required for safety, i.e. the driver may safely go to sleep or leave the driver's seat."
Level 4 is like a Level 5, but that doesn't let you enable it for every route (e.g. you might be manually driving until the highway, then enable self-driving and go to sleep, then wake up with it parked right after the exit you chosen).
Humans are able to "Level 5" driving, so...
...which is also partly the motivation to improve.
I expect self-driving cars long-term to be a lot like air travel. It'll have a reputation for being super unsafe, with lots of people paranoid of it, for decades after it has far eclipsed the safety of regular human car driving. The paranoid hyper-focus and ridiculous press coverage is also what will enable it to become essentially perfect (like passenger air travel is today in the developed world).
It's because in almoost all cases, one fatal mistake results in one fatal accident. And in most cases, the failing party is part of the accident - giving us reason enough to believe people to what they can to avoid it.
With AI, one sloppy mistake can be the root cause of 100 fatalities, with no risk to the one who made the mistake. That's part of the reason we don't accept it.
It's a stop-gap if you believe automation is going handle 100% of the problems. It is how things are going to be, going forward, if you think the system is going to stop at 99%+something reliability.
Call-center employment would be fairly stressful and unpleasant but it might compensate for those made unemployed by self-driving trucks (there are 100's of thousands of truck drivers in the US).
That's a huge if and it's not clear we're even close.
https://blog.piekniewski.info/2017/05/11/a-car-safety-myths-...
https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/02/09/a-v-safety-2018-upd...
How is a call center employee any different than management who ignored concerns over fatigue on Southwest plains?
But it’s a call center employee that you’re focused on
Not the more obvious “humans are largely garbage to each other if they stand to gain or retain some power over other humans”
People want to be the prison guard, not the prisoner, then prison guard manager
So the indifference doesn’t just stay in the call center.
Imagine being a lowly “meat bag” in the call center. You’re presented with an endless stream of situations so difficult that the robot can’t solve. Eventually, you make a mistake, and people die. Checkmate.
Whether the commands are given by an AI or a call center employee, I would additionally highlight the "remote" part (please read as "over a possiby flaky GSM or satellite connection that can have an hiccup at any time).
Will receive the "full instruction package" IF the connection works at the needed time or however before it is needed.
The approach could be very good for whatever you have time for AND that is not "vital", just as an example to correct a navigation plan, but for something in an "emergency" the reliability of the connection at the right time needs to be taken into account.
The thing is that here may be a small team that send the same fixes to cars all day whilst some complicated roadworks or an event happens.
That seems like a poor comparison, given how difficult it'd be to kill me via SSH access to my laptop.
And this is why level 5 autonomous cars are basically strong AI: current roads assume that a human controls every vehicle. When some guys want to unload a truck full of bricks, they park, turn on the flashers, and wave traffic through in alternating directions. Humans understand this, but good luck teaching a robot. The Nissan solution of having the robot freak out for 30 seconds before a remote operator moves it out of the way is better than nothing, but hardly great.
Of course, there's a big class of problems which can't be dealt with by remote takeover at all, such as "should I hit this unclassified small obstruction that's entered the roadway or brake/swerve in a manner almost certain to result in a collision?"
Combining the two, it sounds like their system is ACLAAB that comes to a full stop and "phones home" when it gets confused. But how often will it get confused? Will it be better than the self-check bag sensor detecting your reusable bag correctly? And how long will it take someone in their call center to "pick up their phone call" and remotely drive the car?
This might be an acceptable situation for driving elderly people to the grocery store. But it's going to cause a great deal of frustration for other drivers - having to deal with cars that stop at random spots on the street or highway - and sit there for up to a minute as someone remotes in to drive.
[0] http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2017/07/nissan-propilot-a...
> One method is to detect torque on the steering wheel, hinted Musk. “So we might issue a visual and auditory alert to make sure you’re okay.”
I can see a lot of rear-ended Nissan cars in my crystal ball.
So you have to spend the resources to develop self-driving technology and to maintain a stable of remote drivers. And all that- for what? Human brains are still in control of cars and car AI is still dumb as bricks often enough to make them less safe than humans. If you had problems with humans forced to jump in and take control at a moment's notice where the car failed, before, now you're making these problems even worse by having someone take control remotely so that they're even less aware of the unfolding situation than the human in the car.
It's just ...pointless. It makes even less sense than a car that drives itself safely only when you're paying attention (hey, I can kill myself when I'm not paying attention just fine on my own, I don't need an AI car to do that).
And what about the claim that the rest of the time the self-driving car is safer than a human? How do we know that self-driving cars are safer than cars driven by a human?
When self-driving cars become more prevalent, couldn't we have standardized signage that allows the cars to deal with exceptional road conditions like the example in the article?
Agreeing on industry-wide standards (insert relevant xkcd link here) can make such situations solvable for the machine, by employing well-recognizable clues that signify, for example, 'ignore red light and drive on opposite side of the street'.