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Comment by Devils-Avocado | Hacker News Reader

Is this also a solution to edge-cases for autonomous vehicles? eg. driven by AI 99.9% of the time, and for the 0.1% (eg. breakdown, flooding, police action) they are taken over by a remote driver and driven slowly and carefully back to normal road conditions?

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I'm doubtful. The problem we see currently is humans are terrible at paying attention to boring things. And AI driving is largely boring. Right up until something unusual happens, but if the human is asleep/watching their phone/etc, it's already too late.

I don't see how a remote driver solves that problem. They're probably even more likely to be distracted or asleep because they aren't in the car and their life isn't on the line.

That just means that humans cannot be trusted to notice or respond quickly to an emergency situation. The situations parent listed do not require immediate intervention. When the system detects an anomalous situation it can raise an alarm and shutdown while it waits for a grumpy human to show up and resolve the situation.

and importantly if it were a remote human who was alerted and put in control they'd be waiting to do it as their job and not the sleeping/drunk/texting driver in the vehicle

I just bought an electric car and it doesn't come with a spare tyre - the battery takes up too much room. If you get a flat you just have to call roadside assistance. So there are already good networks set up to handle these edge cases without having to build in a remote driving system that hardly gets used.

I recently bought a Hybrid SUV. No spare tire because of the battery. But it comes with run flats, fix-a-flat, and a portable air compressor. Once the warranty expires I plan on mounting a real spare on the roof. We go camping and I just can't see roadside assistance covering the countryside.

Haha. Run-flats aren't just a problem in the countryside. My wife's BMW doesn't have a spare. Run-flats are only good to ~50mph and 50 miles when flat.

So what happens when you blow out the sidewall on a Friday evening on an interstate in suburban NY? You call AAA, wait 3 hours in the pouring rain, and get towed the nearest tire dealer (that's already closed for the day), check into the hotel across the street, and then miss out on the Saturday activities you had planned while you wait for the tire shop to open and get your tire replaced.

I'll never buy a car without a spare again. Run-flats are nearly useless unless you just happen to be near a tire shop during open hours.

True but with an AV they would presumably be geofenced to areas where they can be supported. I don't think it's likely that a remote operator would take control to drive an AV when it's outside a defined ODD (Operational Design Domain).

That's not particular to EVs. Many cars (could be most, I don't have anything aside from a lot of anecdata however) no longer come with an actual spare. Just a can of fix-a-flat and an electric pump.

I have long imagined that this is how long-haul trucking will be end to end computerized, as the highway miles are the (relatively) easy part to automate with FSD, as most of that tech is already here (adaptive cruise, lanekeeping). Getting the thing from dock to highway, and from highway to dock, will require (remote) human eyes and hands for some while yet.

The future might look something like this https://www.google.com/search?q=spmt+remote&tbm=isch where highway miles are done by computer and the last few hundred feet are done by remote. For low speed work, sitting in the cab is a significant disadvantage.

Maybe some AI and sensors would also be useful in the fully remotely driven vehicles to ensure that people can also operate in the warehouse without too much fear of being run over.

Otherwise I'd hate to rely on somebody who-knows-where noticing in time that I'm there or responding in time to my voice.

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