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I think remote driving could be interesting in combination with automated driving. For example, self-driving cars are already "safer" than human drivers in ide

I think remote driving could be interesting in combination with automated driving. For example, self-driving cars are already "safer" than human drivers in ideal conditions, but what about when conditions change rapidly. Can a self-driving car detect when the situation is 100% ideal and it's 100% certain there is nothing going wrong, and differentiate from being less than 100% sure that everything is optimal? Can a human at a dispatch center be brought in to potentially assist when this happens? And can this make the trip overall safer? For example, a self-driving car driving along an empty highway in daylight on a dry day is very unlikely to encounter any issues, but an animal may still jump out in front of the car. If that happens, it should be able to brake on its own, but a human at a dispatch center might be brought in as copilot also, to ensure things go smoothly. Maybe it's not an animal, but a shadow crossing the road from a stray cloud overhead. The AI might not be able to determine 100% whether it's safe to proceed. A human can make this determination and continue the trip (or slam on the brakes)

airza 4y ago
Why not just have a human in the car??? Is equipping a car with a 5g modem so that you can pay 2$/hr an hour to someone in SEA to drive your car really the horizon of human achievement?
- luckylion 4y ago
  You'd only need a human while the car is driving. If the human needs to be physically in the car, they couldn't just switch to a different car when this one has been parked, and you'd need to organize their own travel when they take a car somewhere remote, or need to fetch it from there. This would still be massively cheaper even if you pay the driver whatever you'd pay them locally for driving in person, simply because of less downtime, e.g. while a truck is being loaded.
  - airza 4y ago
    So it’s being a driver without any of the downtime of a driver? That’s somehow even worse!
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Let's say you have 1000 self-driving long-haul trips that have an accident rate of anywhere from 0.1*A to 10*A (where A is the rate of accidents with human drivers) with just self-driving. Let's say 100% of the time there is an accident, the self-driving system is able to determine with at least 1 second of notice that human intervention could make the upcoming segment of the trip safer, and such flagged sections constitute less than 0.1% of the time the vehicle would otherwise be in operation. Let's also say a highly trained team of 10 people, monitoring that fleet of 1000 vehicles, selected for fast reaction, and with adequate training could theoretically prevent 99% of at-fault incidents, bringing it down to a range of 0.001*A to 0.1*A. I don't know if this would actually play out, but if the above assumptions were found to be accurate, then it'd be hard to make an argument for having human drivers in the vehicle when this system at scale could reduce at-fault accidents to <10% of the current rate Think Mechanical Turk meets Lambda for improving self-driving car safety
deleted 4y ago
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soneil 4y ago
> If that happens, it should be able to brake on its own, but a human at a dispatch center might be brought in as copilot also, to ensure things go smoothly. I'm not sure I'd trust a human more than a machine in this circumstance. Just being dropped in with a split-second to make a decision? It's not like you can get 30 seconds of replay to get your bearings etc, otherwise by time the human is ready, the problem's already over. There's a lot of "state" that a driver should already have built up for this. Traffic, road conditions, who's behind me, etc. Just being thrown into a situation that's rapidly devolving sounds like a nightmare.

airza 4y ago

Why not just have a human in the car??? Is equipping a car with a 5g modem so that you can pay 2$/hr an hour to someone in SEA to drive your car really the horizon of human achievement?

luckylion 4y ago
You'd only need a human while the car is driving. If the human needs to be physically in the car, they couldn't just switch to a different car when this one has been parked, and you'd need to organize their own travel when they take a car somewhere remote, or need to fetch it from there. This would still be massively cheaper even if you pay the driver whatever you'd pay them locally for driving in person, simply because of less downtime, e.g. while a truck is being loaded.
- airza 4y ago
  So it’s being a driver without any of the downtime of a driver? That’s somehow even worse!
pcthrowaway 4y ago
Let's say you have 1000 self-driving long-haul trips that have an accident rate of anywhere from 0.1*A to 10*A (where A is the rate of accidents with human drivers) with just self-driving. Let's say 100% of the time there is an accident, the self-driving system is able to determine with at least 1 second of notice that human intervention could make the upcoming segment of the trip safer, and such flagged sections constitute less than 0.1% of the time the vehicle would otherwise be in operation. Let's also say a highly trained team of 10 people, monitoring that fleet of 1000 vehicles, selected for fast reaction, and with adequate training could theoretically prevent 99% of at-fault incidents, bringing it down to a range of 0.001*A to 0.1*A. I don't know if this would actually play out, but if the above assumptions were found to be accurate, then it'd be hard to make an argument for having human drivers in the vehicle when this system at scale could reduce at-fault accidents to <10% of the current rate Think Mechanical Turk meets Lambda for improving self-driving car safety

deleted 4y ago

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soneil 4y ago

> If that happens, it should be able to brake on its own, but a human at a dispatch center might be brought in as copilot also, to ensure things go smoothly. I'm not sure I'd trust a human more than a machine in this circumstance. Just being dropped in with a split-second to make a decision? It's not like you can get 30 seconds of replay to get your bearings etc, otherwise by time the human is ready, the problem's already over. There's a lot of "state" that a driver should already have built up for this. Traffic, road conditions, who's behind me, etc. Just being thrown into a situation that's rapidly devolving sounds like a nightmare.