Dangers Of Self-Driving Cars That Rely On Remote Human Operators

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

There are three major modes involved in remote access to a true self-driving driverless autonomous car.

Remote monitoring. The simplest mode of remote access is remote monitoring of a self-driving car.

In this case, the remote capability allows someone to know whether the car is turned on or not, or whether the car is moving or not, or whether the car has been involved possibly in a crash or not.

You might already be familiar with this kind of feature since conventional cars now have this. You can press a button and speak with a human in a faraway remote center, and tell them you are out-of-gas and they’ll call for roadside assistance. Or, if you are lonely, I suppose you can just carry on a conversation with another human, with them sitting somewhere in say Nova Scotia, while you are stuck in your car and enduring the daily bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic.

Remote non-piloting control. In this second and more advanced mode, the remotely based human can actually take over some controls of the car, but…