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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

This is the obvious stopgap measure so you can get to market when your self-driving software is very very good but not quite perfect. You use the data from these situations to improve the software, requiring fewer and fewer manual interventions until you only need human assistance in truly exceptional situations like physical damage to the sensors.

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.

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Level 4 self-driving seems the second-least desirable after Level 0, as it's entirely passive but requires full active attention. It's a ripe situation for distraction, something Tesla cars attempt to combat with the "wheel-squeeze".

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.

Or regulators step in after too many inattentive human drivers fail to prevent very avoidable Level 4 accidents, and we end up with Level 2 driving with Level 5 parking capability permitted only on specific private properties.

Nah, that's Level 3.

"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).

> Maybe Level 5 will prove to be an NP problem.

Humans are able to "Level 5" driving, so...

For a subset of cases, but not all of them, as traffic safety statistics show.

Yup. Humans are allowed to make mistakes and fail fatally. If self-driving cars make a single fatal mistake, then watch out for negative press coverage for weeks. Why? Because every failure can be traced back to a root cause. Every root cause (other than something like another driver literally trying to kill you) looks like an incompetent screw-up after peeling back all the layers. In principle, self-driving cars are basically perfectly safe (as a system). So every failure causes righteous fingerpointing.

...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).

> Yup. Humans are allowed to make mistakes and fail fatally.

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.

I think you’re right that human drivers makes it a lot easier to blame the victim (even though it’s really the whole system that made it possible for the human to make such a mistake that is responsible... the system isn’t held to account because it’s just so easy to blame the human for making the proximate fatal error).

Except it won’t work at scale. What happens when it snows and there aren’t enough call center workers to take over for all the drivers who need it? Probably a few times a year around here there is enough snow and it’s enough of a surprise where it takes a while to clean up even major roads so you can see the lines. If self driving cars need lines in the road or else a human to take over in that situation, you’re talking about cities grinding to a halt several times a year.

Snow is a pretty localized event. Surely call centers could be built to support entire regions/countries where spikes would average out.

It's an obvious measure.

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).

> 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.

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...

Seems to exacerbate skin in the game problems of the modern world. Why would a call center employee do a better job at protecting your life than you? And more importantly, why would anyone delegate their life to that call center employee?

I imagine the remote control will be some sort of situational guidance ("proceed slowly to the right of the object and then continue"). You'll still be trusting the soulless machine encasing you to mind your safety.

I'm totally blind so I'd trust the call center employee more then my self. I'd love to have a self driving car that could get me where I wanted to go 99% of the time, as long as the 1% failure mode aborted the trip and sent me back home with out killing me. Something like a call center employee turning the car around and sending me home if the weather was going to be to snowy to make the trip would be life changing for me. Uber and Lift are useful, but not cost effective for daily commuting.

Bit naive, yes?

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.

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