This was a plot point in Captain Laserhawk: All the self-driving cars and flying drones were actually being remotely piloted by prisoners in a massive VR facility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Laserhawk:_A_Blood_Dra...
GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
51–60 of 190 posts
Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#52It's not an allegation. It's the same as using human feedback for tuning large language models. There are no autonomous cars currently regardless of what is written on the marketing brochures. In various "emergency" situations the cars phone home and ask a human operator to take over the controls.
This is completely incorrect. Remote operators cannot “take over controls” at all and hence cannot help in any “emergency” i.e. safety critical situation (e.g. preventing a crash). All they can do is assist the vehicle with things drawing a path to get around a parked vehicle, instructing it to do a multi-point turn when it’s stuck and so on. What the article says is that Cruise vehicles need some sort of assistance…
Do you work at Cruise?
Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human in the loop can be vastly cheaper than you might think. If this lets them have the only level 5 system on the market they could double that and millions would happily pay. Suppose your a trucking company would you rather pay 50k / year or 5k/year? That’s a stupidly easy choice. Americans drive roughly 500 hours per year. If they can replace 98% with automation and the other 2% with someone making 20$/hour that…
Human in the loop is fine. Negative unit economics and massive expansion are not.
Who says they can’t recover the full cost? Cars don’t last forever, bake the cost in upfront or charge a monthly fee.
Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#54> Having to be remotely operated every 2.5 to 5 miles
Regarding Cruises' suspension, how likely is it that the backup driver restarted the car to drive again after the car stopped with the pedestrian below?
Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#55Having to be remotely operated every 2.5 to 5 miles seem to defeat most of the economics of self driving cars. Back of the napkin math, cars drive at an average of 18mph in cities, so every 10-20min. Let’s assume it takes over for 1min, and that you need remote drivers not too far for ping purposes, so at the same hourly rate. To guarantee you’ll be able to take over all demands immediately, due to the birthday parad…
Wages can fall off a cliff within modest distances. To use unemployment rate as a proxy for driver pay, Bakersfield, CA 7.5% and San Francisco, CA 3.5%. Go a little farther to Los Vegas 5.7% and one can avoid California's minimum wage.
Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is completely incorrect. Remote operators cannot “take over controls” at all and hence cannot help in any “emergency” i.e. safety critical situation (e.g. preventing a crash). All they can do is assist the vehicle with things drawing a path to get around a parked vehicle, instructing it to do a multi-point turn when it’s stuck and so on. What the article says is that Cruise vehicles need some sort of assistance…
Do you work at Cruise?
No.
Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#57Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human in the loop is fine. Negative unit economics and massive expansion are not.
Who says they can’t recover the full cost? Cars don’t last forever, bake the cost in upfront or charge a monthly fee.
I'm not saying they can't - I'm saying they are running out of time to do so, and with the DMV shutting them down they've been hamstrung further.
They are burning 100s of millions every quarter. They needed to show either growth/expansion or some sort of positive cash flow. They now have neither.
Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The latency on that has to be massive.
Why? UAVs are piloted remotely, video games are played remotely with sub-100ms latency. Getting a remote driver connected might a while, but afterwards it seems like a mostly solved (in practice) problem.
UAVs don't have to deal with traffic (the thought of driving a vehicle with the latency and intermittent connectivity of my drone horrifies me) and when someone dies in a video game they respawn...
Re: GM's Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve "autonomous" driving
#60Cruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows.
Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations.
The stat quoted by nyt is how frequently the AVs initiate an RA session. Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode.
In terms of staffing, we are intentionally over staffed given our small fleet size in order to handle localized bursts of RA demand. With a larger fleet we expect to handle bursts with a smaller ratio of RA operators to AVs. Lastly, I believe the staffing numbers quoted by nyt include several other functions involved in operating fleets of AVs beyond remote assistance (people who clean, charge, maintain, etc.) which are also something that improve significantly with scale and over time.