Tesla to Hire Team to Control ‘Self-Driving’ Robotaxis Remotely
In the next several years, Tesla will roll out “fully autonomous” vehicles. As “Cybercab” (Elon Musk calls), Tesla’s self-driving robotaxi service is to start by 2026, so Tesla will hire a team to control robotaxis remotely. Recent reports show a human team required by the company to remotely troubleshoot its robotaxi operations. Because “fully autonomous,” as Musk has used it, might be a bit of a misnomer.
Recent job postings by Tesla advertise a role to build out a remote teleoperations team for the firm’s upcoming robotaxi fleet.“Our cars and robots operate autonomously in challenging environments. As we iterate on the AI that powers them, we need the ability to access and control them remotely,” the job posting states. The job posting also states “building highly optimized low latency reliable data streaming over unreliable transports in the real world.” Tele-operators can be “transported” into the robotaxi via a “state-of-the-art VR rig,” it adds.
Other companies, like General Motors’s Cruise, also hired human assistants to troubleshoot vehicles.Waymo robotaxi owned by Google and Amazon’s Zoox also tried the same method
In general, it reveals that companies making hypes of autonomous vehicles to grow their market is actually controlled by low-wage human contractors. Last year it was reported that some of the pivotal work behind ChatGPT, OpenAI’s prized chatbot, was powered by human workers who were only being paid $15 per hour.
