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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Where did you get this information? There are definitely people ready to respond to any requests from the car or passenger when they come up, but I've never read anything to indicate that each ride is actively monitored by a person.

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Search for "driver monitoring system". As soon as there is something unexpected there is an actual driver taking care of it. Also the reason why it's not level 5, but stuck at level 4 self driving.

That's not "always a driver monitoring". They're not actively monitoring all of them all of the time, they're responding to requests from the car.

And they're not drivers, they're supervisors. They don't take over driving, AFAICT they issue high-level commands like "safe to proceed", "take the right lane", et cetera.

There is always somebody ready to respond. Of course they can't take full control, that would be stupid dangerous, but they can still control the car. They even have people who go to your car to get it unstuck manually when needed.

> There is always somebody ready to respond

I mean, this is true for Uber as well.

They can tell the car what to do like a human navigator in the front seat, but they don't directly operate the car. Those are very different things.

How many cars does each person monitor?

Nobody is driving the car remotely, that would be an enormous liability. The car calls in and either asks the operator to make a decision for them or tell it where to go. Once they do that, the car handles the how. You're making a lot of proclamations about this stuff without a strong understanding about how it works.

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