Elon Musk's "fully autonomous" cars will, like other robotaxi vehicles, rely on remote human pilots.
  • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
    23·
    9 months ago

    So does he now want people working from home or not?

    He’s very inconsistent.

    • Sweetpeaches69@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      9 months ago

      Oh, don’t mistake. They’ll still have to go into an office, they’ll just be driving the cars remotely, most likely.

  • WoodScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    9 months ago

    The self-driving taxis and humanoid robots companies like Tesla are developing are just a thinly disguised way of getting around immigration law. We’re a very long way away from having autonomous humanoid robots that can clean your house for you. But one remotely piloted by someone in Bangladesh wearing a haptic suit? If the tech was cheap enough, that sort of thing would be profitable.

    It’s effectively an extremely perverse and exploitive form of immigration. When we bring immigrants in, they typically take low-level jobs. But they also get opportunities to advance themselves further. Moreover, in the US at least, any children immigrants have on US soil automatically become US citizens. So yes, immigrants come in on the bottom of the social ladder, but they have an opportunity to climb.

    Here though? This is a way of getting all the labor we want from immigrants but without offering them the usual deal in return. And even worse, they won’t even be owed minimum wage.

    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      Not only that, there is now a middleman involved so the citizens still get screwed instead of being able to access cheap labour directly.

  • rational_lib@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    9 months ago

    On the one hand, this means they may be serious about actually trying to make this work. On the other hand, it’ll almost certainly require a subscription to use the robotaxi in fully autonomous mode because that’ll be an ongoing liability for Tesla.

  • 2pt_perversion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    421·
    9 months ago

    Waymo is doing the same. Mostly self-driving but when they get stuck a human at a help center takes the sticks. There are a lot of edge cases in the real world so it makes sense to just have the car programmed to be very conservative and let a human deal with it.

    • medgremlin@midwest.socialEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      There was an incident not too long ago where one of these robo-taxis ran a woman over to avoid another car doing something it didn’t expect and then it froze up and wouldn’t move at all with the woman trapped under the car. There wasn’t a driver to get out and help and it took a few minutes for bystanders to get involved to help her, and she ended up dying at the scene.

      If we can’t get rid of these monstrosities, at least having a human monitoring them that can call 911 is important, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of there not being a human present to render aid if something goes wrong. (Not to imply that every human will be willing or able to render aid, but some chance of help is better than no chance of help.)

  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    221·
    9 months ago

    Just subreptitiously sell it as a video game, you won’t even have to pay the drivers. I don’t see what could go wrong with this plan.

  • lipilee@feddit.nlEnglish
    16·
    9 months ago

    scammers pull the same shit over the world since the mechanical turk. at this point the joke’s on us.

  • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
    15·
    9 months ago

    Basically what the self driving food delivery robots do in Berkeley, then

    They are pretty autonomous, but if they get stuck then someone in Colombia takes control

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      Yarp. This all being sensationalized before we see the actual product and see how it is being implemented. They aren’t remotely driving cars at 50mph down a highway, they are going to remotely tell the car to pull over when someone puts a cone on the hood at a stop light as a prank, or if it gets stuck where it believe it may hit something in every direction, where it is stopped and someone will evaluate the risk via the cameras and guide the car in the best direction. So likely you need 1 person for a very large number of cars.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.mlEnglish
    25·
    9 months ago

    When are people ever going to figure out that Tesla’s “autopilot” is a freaking scam?