Ah yes, you know what's better than a taxi driver? A taxi driver who relies on a camera with a limited field of vision, experiences input and video lag, and receives none of the tactile sensations that allow drivers to gauge road conditions.

“Remotely control”, or “drive” if you will.

3 weeks later:

"Your honour, it was the ping!"

Hey more jobs for taxi drivers and safer to do from the comfort of your home. Just like a drone pilot!

Who would have thought that Taxi drivers one day would be able to work from home?

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.

We already knew this was coming.

https://xkcd.com/1897/

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.

How can I apply?

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 (the vehicles appear to have run into trouble every four to five miles). Google’s Waymo is also thought to employ the same practice, as does Zoox, the robotaxi firm owned by Amazon.

Ah, the old mechanical Turk trick. This time with chance of man slaughter.

When are people ever going to figure out that Tesla's "autopilot" is a freaking scam?

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

He's very inconsistent.

"How was your day, honey ?"

"I killed thirty people in a pile-up on Hwy74 remotely. I'll be a little late."

This is gonna kill people from the input lag alone.

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.

I'm in, with generations of GTA experience

How about hiring people to drive the taxis.... Instead of hiring people to remotely drive the taxi... What exactly would be the difference??? Except actually having the driver in the vehicle is proven to work....

6 months from now it will be illegal to report crashes involving these cars.

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

ahahahahahaha!!

That's freaking hilarious. Muskie is an idjit.

That's like a normal taxi with extra steps!

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