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.

is planning to hire a human team to remotely troubleshoot its robotaxi operations.

Ok so they're not remotely driving, as the title would have you believe.

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."

Should be totally shut down until self diving is perfected. Shouldn't even be allowed the chance to lie about it.

Also they should get taxed into the ground. Like $5,000 Bill for signing a new customer up, and $60k every time the service is used. Daddy Warbucks can afford it and he be fixing the economy.

I'm in, with generations of GTA experience

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

So can I also start remote driving my car?

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.

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.

We already knew this was coming.

https://xkcd.com/1897/

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.

3 weeks later:

"Your honour, it was the ping!"

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.

How can I apply?

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?

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