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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

It seems to be completely pie in the sky type of thinking.

The only rational -non delusional- reason I see for the talk is if Musk does it to get better financing terms before the self driving hype dries down.

I think taxi services without driver are coming but the the secret sauce is remote human operator working together with high level of automation. Driver is the main cost of taxi service. If you get one operator to remotely oversee 20 highly autonomous vehicles and provide input when needed, the cost of taxi-service drops into a fraction of what it used to be and service is better than fully autonomous driving.

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So humans that can barely drive a single vehicle will now be responsible for monitoring 20 vehicles in highly different environments that change at a moments notice?

Not at a moment's notice. The automation must react during emergencies, but humans can navigate and solve stuff that the automation can't.

Yes. The car is responsible for the safety in all circumstances and recognizes it's limitations. Think level 4 autonomy.

As soon as the car sees it cannot proceed properly, it parks somewhere or go in a safe situation and requests a remote human operator to intervene. Then the whole point is to have a call center sized so that you do not have to wait too much.

We're not there yet, and giving back the control to the passengers is also a possibility. However, in a world where passengers almost never drive, it might be safer to give the control to trained remote operators.

> It seems to be completely pie in the sky type of thinking.

Agreed. This is just more of the usual Musk hype. Maybe he will get some geofenced taxi service going in a suburb of Phoenix, where the roads are wide and straight and the weather is always sunny.

> the secret sauce is remote human operator

New startup idea: Instead of paying people to mine WoW gold 14 hours a day, pay them to pilot taxis via a low-latency satellite link. "Hi, I'm 'Joe' from 'The Bronx,' and I will be your taxi driver today."

> If you get one operator to remotely oversee 20 highly autonomous vehicles

This doesn't work, because the situations that require human intervention will also require near-human reaction times. That's not possible for a single human herding 20 cars.

> This doesn't work,

Automation must still react instantly to sudden situations (you need liars for this). Humans are there for difficult-to-navigate scenarios and stuff that robo-cars can't handle. Waymo is already testing this in geofenced areas.

I would never trust such a ridiculous system. I don't know that many other people would either. Although I would also not trust a fully autonomous vehicle either until more evidence is provided that we were even within 20 years of it.

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