This will probably result in very few jobs. The number will decline as the technology gets better, too. The USPS's first machine sorting system had tens of thousands of people keying in the ZIP codes as envelopes went by. Then that was automated for machine-addressed mail with specific fonts. Then for all typed and printed ZIP codes. Then for all typed and printed full addresses. Then for clearer handwritten addresses. Now there's just one national center where a few people look at images of illegible addresses.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegi...</a>
I hope they do not start using remote controlled cars on highways.<p>A car going at 60mph (~100kmh) travels at 26m/second. 4G has a ping of ~70ms* on top of the time from the cell tower to the operator's computer.<p>However, I found quite a variance in pings when browsing on the phone, anywhere from 200-300ms at times (maybe due to changing the tower).<p>So round trip might be at 600ms. Then we account for variance in bandwidth, human reaction time etc.
All in all we might be looking at a delay of at least 1s. Guesstimating, of course. That's still 26m of a 2 ton vehicle going at 100kmh without oversight.<p>* According to <a href="https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online-gaming-mobile-broadband/" rel="nofollow">https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online...</a>
It's a lot easier to dehumanize a person when you are sitting behind the screen of Twitter / Instagram / UAV (unmanned air vehicle), pushing buttons...<p>When you rob someone of their humanity, then you too lose your humanity, making us all robots that can be disposed of anytime...
<i>...remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets.</i><p>This terrifies me. The speed of light RTT from the west coast to India and back again is around 100msec. This is on the order of human reaction time. Real world latency we are talking way more than that. I get wacky routes to India traversing most of the world, so I get pings >400msec from the US to India. 400msec is more than enough latency to kill you. Teleop is a silly idea for big fast death machines on wheels (cars), especially if there’s significant latency in the teleop.
Isn't that what some companies claiming to be AI/ML champions are doing when they are actually "employing" real humans through MTurk and the likes to do the work.
There is some version of this that creates a dystopian future where AI software companies shed liability by outsourcing ethical decisions to armies of contractors.<p>With AI currently set up as the "next big thing" this article is just another version of the "Natural Language Processing" and human augmented AI, that is being used by almost everyone to "fake it until you don't need humans any more" (see Apple, Amazon, Google listening to our audio as a backup for Siri, Alexa, and Now). A necessary stop gap.<p>I think there is a big opportunity to look past the stop gap and talk about technologies that are going to 10x the things humans are already good at (creativity, empathy, intuitive problem solving, ...).
My 2c, instead of building autonomous cars/robots which work in our current cities, we should just redesign our cities to cater for these new ideas. We could have an autonomous delivery system with current technology if we just put aside some dedicated space for them to operate. No fancy AI, just good old fashioned sensors and control systems. Put roughly pallet sized tunnels under the roads, and it doesnt even have to encroach on public space. Way less problems in the long run IMHO.
That remote controlled car idea is stupid. So many things can go wrong. What if the connection gets interrupted?<p>And perhaps the most important thing - when there is a human driver, he is also responsible for his own life, so he will drive very carefully.<p>This is a shit idea and it will fail.
It's interesting the effect that uber, amazon a gig working have had. Where "traditional jobs^" are created, the immediate expectation is that this will be uberified... More like selling icecream during summer tourist season than working in trucking.<p>^Traditional in the "standardized job that 5k people do for us."
Who will be held accountable when one of these robots inevitably harms or injures someone? Since these sorts of robots seen to be semi-automated, does this effectively abstract away any real responsibility? Can robots only be responsible for nothing more than an "unfortunate accident"?
This reminds me of "god of the gaps" idea where the receding domain of things doesn't show a clear line of stopping. It seems more like a limitation of the current implementation as the opportunity but watch out for the next version.
I don't see how replacing dozens of people with one robot and a human 'minder' is at all, <i>juicing the workforce</i>. Its just more automation.
Concerns about ping assume all tasks will require real-time control by the human. Realistically, a supervisory system will have the human identifying hazards and gaps in the autonomous system's sensory capacity.<p>Quick-reaction collision avoidance will be controlled by radar (77 GHz etc.) or lidar.
It would be an interesting proposition to have the option to drive yourself or to seamlessly switch it over to autonomous driving monitored by a remote driver for $0.0X per minute.
There are actual startups that are "pretending to be robots", so the title is off: This article is about legitimate remote-operations work, and it's a really great thing, not something to be ridiculed as the title makes it. Some of them like postmates or remote driving seem like typical VC silliness but others could be lifesaving, like , imagine a remote-controlled da-vinci surgical machine.