this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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355
Tesla Is Looking to Hire a Team to Remotely Control Its 'Self-Driving' Robotaxis (gizmodo.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
74 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Silicon Valley wants us to believe that their autonomous products are a kind of self-guided magic, but the technology is clearly not there yet. A quick peak behind the curtain has consistently revealed a product base that, at a minimum, is still deeply reliant on human workforces.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (9 children)

The job post also notes that such a teleoperation center requires “building highly optimized low latency reliable data streaming over unreliable transports in the real world.” Tele-operators can be “transported” into the robotaxi via a “state-of-the-art VR rig,” it adds.

Oh man that's pretty hilarious for "autonomous vehicles"

Tesla would not be the first robotaxi company to use this method. In fact, it’s an industry standard. It was previously reported that Cruise, the robotaxi company owned by General Motors, was employing remote human assistants to troubleshoot when its vehicles ran into trouble

Oh, so this is actually completely normal and should not be news worthy...

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Remote human intervention when automated systems fail should be expected and required to be honest with current technology. There are simply too many edge cases in the real world, even with the trillions of miles Tesla has trained their system on.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

When will the intervention be called upon? How we react is defined by the context we have. Imagine being dropped into a pre accident situation without any context.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

No idea, and I doubt they'll ever publicly say.

Direct human intervention is definitely something other companies could be doing more of. Waymo especially given all the videos of them getting stuck, sometimes en masse.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I had heard through a friend who works at Waymo they currently have 1.5 engineers per car. Ideally, if you want a self-driving car company to be financially successful, that number should be significantly less than 1. These companies are heavily propped up by VC money and it’s not at all clear they’ll achieve that goal.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I find that 1.5 number amazingly hard to believe unless those engineers are never actually watching the vehicles while in use, in which case the number means absolutely nothing. The number of engineers per vehicle on staff means absolutely nothing if they aren't the ones monitoring them for issues while in use. You might as well say you have 50 employees per vehicle, including all office workers, executives, janitorial staff, etc. because it means nothing.

Given videos like this where there are dozens of them in complete chaos. Human intervention would easily clear that in a couple minutes, instead they just kept stacking up.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

Waymo, uniquely, never remotely drives their vehicles. You’d have to wait for a safety driver to show up in order to help the vehicle

Other companies do remotely drive

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Remote human intervention when automated systems fail should be expected and required to be honest with current technology.

The "human in the loop" is one of those things that sounds good but isn't at all in reality.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/

A human was literally sitting at the wheel as Uber's taxi ran someone over.

Driving is nothing but edge cases, and that's why maybe paying drivers to drive people around is better than some half-baked AI driving people under trucks and hoping a call center employee is paying enough attention to bail them out.

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