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Comment by sacado2 | Hacker News Reader

> the solution is to call the human operators who can control it remotely

Sounds like a recipe for failure, to be honest. In a potentially life or death situation, the last thing I want is to rely on a remote human being. Plus, if the device entered an erroneous state, I certainly don't trust it to correctly interpret a remote "emergency stop" signal.

If the machine goes crazy (and there is no world where driving around a parking lot until the end of time is the rational expected behavior), the only safe option is a big, red, cut-circuit emergency stop button.

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> In a potentially life or death situation

Which, once more, was not happening here. The car was lost, not out of control. And the built-in solution was applied, and worked.

What do you really want here? You've never been in a Uber that took a wrong turn? Never argued with a cab driver about a route? Never been stuck in an airliner at the end of a runway waiting for clearance? Vehicles do things their occupants don't like all the time, and no one freaks out on the internet about it.

If a cab driver or Uber driver locks you into their car and doesn't allow you to get out, that's "false imprisonment", a felony in most jurisdictions, carrying a sentence of several years of prison. It is very unusual for them to even lock the doors such that you need their help to open them. The last time I had to open an Uber door in a moving car to force the driver to stop—because he'd lied about having air conditioning to get the fare—was two weeks ago.

Airliners are legally required to have emergency exit doors that can be activated by anyone inside the airliner as long as the cabin isn't pressurized. You also know, before you board the airliner, that you won't be able to get off it for several hours. So, if you have an appointment with your probation officer in half an hour or need to pick up your kids from school in half an hour, you won't board in the first place.

You're apparently arguing that passengers of self-driving cars should not have the same legal and mechanical protections that the passengers of these other types of vehicles have.

I'm not saying it was happening here, I'm just taking this anecdote as food for thought. I'm appalled to learn that those vehicles don't have an emergency stop system. A real emergency stop. Not some remote-controlled or AI-assisted stuff. A low-tech, last-chance emergency stop, like the one you have in trains or on any industrial machine.

> You've never been in a Uber that took a wrong turn? Never argued with a cab driver about a route?

If a cab driver keeps cricling on a parking lot, again and again and again, never finding the obvious exit, I'll get a bit concerned and eventually tell him "OK, never mind, I'll find another way, just drop me there". If he refuses to let me off, and locks the doors, and keeps circling, I'll be extremely anxious. This is horror movie material.

> I'll get a bit concerned and eventually tell him "OK, never mind, I'll find another way, just drop me there".

Isn't that exactly what happened here? Rider pushed the help button, got help, and was dropped off. Right there.

I think you get to the truth of the matter with your "horror movie material" quip. You don't think this situation was dangerous. You think it was scary because of the robot. Well, OK. But that's not a safety argument.

I agree. Unfortunately just cutting circuits isn't enough; you also need to brake and possibly unlock the doors.

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