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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

Smells ripe for disaster. Not self-driving and will be ridiculed all over the place. I guess the lies are starting to catch up with them.

But not only PR-wise. Imagine any kind of security issues. Or what if the signal is blocked out somehow, unintentionally or intentionally by some bad actor.

Basically this looks like remote taxi drivers. Maybe they will be able to work from home or something. But probably badly paid. And then driver quality might go down. Oh and imagine the PR disaster, if any of them ever gets a customer into a car crash...

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I suspect that the remote driver will not have unilateral control of the car. It'll probably be something along the line of giving hints when the car asks for them.

The drivers won't just be badly paid, I'm sure the hours will be ridiculous. Tired, overworked, underpaid, poorly trained drivers.

The logical step after that will be Mechanical Turk for remote driving.

There’s a lot of ignorance in these comments. do people not realize that Waymo and the other full self driving companies have tele operators as well?

It’s a back up system in case The vehicle gets stuck. Simple as that.

> It’s a back up system in case The vehicle gets stuck

People seems to be thinking emergency control, but that would make no sense. Imagine being dropped into a completely unknown setting, milliseconds away from a crash and being expected to take over the wheel. That's pretty obviously not what this is about, it can't be much beyond a car that hasn't moved in a few minutes because it's stuck.

Tele-operate conjures images of RoboTaxi simulator on Steam, or something.

What's really going on is it's more like Air Traffic Control for a taxi fleet - a welcome and very necessary step.

"Oh 47 is stuck behind a fruit truck, requesting illegal go-around. Authorize it"

The other robot taxi systems with cars actually on the road are SAE level 4 systems. Unless Tesla's will also be level 4 or 5 they are not comparable. Their current consumer FSD systems are level 2.

I'd really like if Tesla had the same system as Waymo, i.e. a disambiguation and no direct control. If it is direct control, i won't trust it.

Waymo can do no wrong though, being part of an organization that's never ever done a bad thing, and different rules apply.

I mean his "IA android" was the same thing.

I really dislike Altman but if Musk was in charge of decision over there ChatGPT would be a pipe into Amazon Mechanical Turks or something like that ...

This is exactly what Waymo are doing right now with their fleet in SF, without an of the issues you raise.

Your concerns are pure FUD.

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