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Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

It is not necessary to be able to deal with unanticipated situations, only to be able to recognise them as such. For self driving taxis, a remote human operator could then intervene.

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You must not play many online competitive games. I have played them for most of my life and I can tell you that latency of even just 100ms will absolutely wreck your ability to respond and react to dynamic, high speed situations with accuracy. “Save the confused autonomous agent about to plow into some pedestrians” is not a game I want to play at anything slower than the speed of my hands on the real steering wheel.

Having little to no responsibility for long periods of time would result in a driver filling the time with other activities, like phone conversations. A frightening number of cabbies blabber on the phone already. It's doubtful their reaction time to take control would be quick enough.

We should be looking at occupations that require people being alert but not engaged for a glimpse into drivers' behavior.

What do you think the typical delay would be between identifying an unknown situation, and a remote operator assessing the situation and taking positive control of the vehicle?

If your answer is more than a small fraction of a second, I have some concerns.

Also the remote human operator doesn’t have the same incentives to avoid an accident.

Ostensibly, their career as a human operator?

I refer you to the human operator of an Uber self driving car, who was playing on her phone while the car ran down a pedestrian crossing the road.

You can relax the time requirement if the vehicle stops on unexpected conditions. If it finds roadworks and successfully identifies it as unknown, it stops and requests manual operation for traversing the obstacle.

If it gets out of the way and stops, fine. If it just says “screw it, halting right here”, it’s going to quickly find itself the subject of public outrage and be banned until resolved I’d think. (I think figuring out a possibly creative way to "get out of the way" might be approximately as hard as the rest of the self-driving challenge.)

Imagine every hundredth car during rush hour detour just stopping for no human driver valid reason.

Imagine areas where you’ve driven where you can’t even keep a voice call connected, let alone the data rates needed for remote piloting assistance.

Imagine Boston’s Big Dig and these not-quite-autonomous cars facing an unknown situation en masse inside a tunnel under water...

I’m 2/3rds of Woz’s age and don’t expect level 5 in my or my kids’ lifetime. Level 5 is a very high hurdle.

Many of these are dynamic situations, like some cargo falling off a trailer, or a deer cumping in your path. Either you react right away, or you are dead. Operator is not going to help.

May I remind you are are at a stage where Tesla cars drove into a trailer and into a concrete wall, a mistake no sober human would make.

Okay, but what if the unanticipated situation only gives you 1.2 seconds to react? Even if the car switched control to a remote operator immediately, there's a lot of context required to navigate driving situations (who is around me, what are the road conditions, am I merging, etc.) that would be hard to absorb in a split second.

And what if the car is in a place with a poor network connection?

I'm not saying your idea is untenable; there are just a lot of corner cases that would also make it a very complex challenge.

Being able to handle those new situations is equivalent to "Level 5". You seem to be making the point that Level 4 is enough, but that's not disagreeing with the argument that we won't reach Level 5.

And what if the connection is down?

Pull off and top, same as would happen if the car suffered a mechanical failure.

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