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Comment by lukasm | Hacker News Reader

They're gonna cover 98% of cases. The rest can be picked up be remote operators.

Remote operators work for flying drones, since those don't have to evade children running onto the road with sub-second reaction times.

For cars there is no way electron-based signal transmission technology can control them with an even marginally acceptable latency.

Latency doesn't matter. What matter is the final outcome. Better skill, software, data etc can compensate that.

Drone pilots can have several seconds of latency. This means remote operators are useless as a backup to the machine if a split second reaction is required.

What do you mean by electron-based signal transmission technology? If you're talking remote control, those signals will be photon based. If you're talking internal control, electrons on wires move pretty fast and many cars already utilize them. Is there much latency difference between mechanically closing the throttle with your foot and signaling a servo to close the throttle? Presumably some situations can be analyzed by a processor and trigger the servo before the human controller has even been able to consciously perceive a scene.

One question:

How do you plan to remote control a moving car with photons?

Edit: Huh, ok. I didn't know radio signals are also photons. Still, the speed of light is significant with sub-second decisions. So even for photon transmission remote control of a moving car in live traffic is not feasible.

So a remote operator is going to be given command of a vehicle which has encountered an unusual situation that the automatics have bailed out of?

Ask the pilots of Air France 447 how well that works out (and they weren't even remote). Oh you can't... they're dead.

You still need an algorithm to decide when it's time to handle control to a remote driver. Who's going to handle the edge cases of that algorithm?

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