Elon Musk has promised that his EV company Tesla will roll out “fully autonomous” vehicles in the next few years. Musk recently unveiled what he called the “Cybercab” and said that Tesla plans to launch a robotaxi service by 2026, competing with other big-name brands currently operating in the space. However, “fully autonomous,” as Musk has used it, might be a bit of a misnomer. Recent reports show the company is planning to hire a human team to remotely troubleshoot its robotaxi operations.
A recently spotted Tesla job listing advertises a role to build out a remote teleoperations team for the firm’s upcoming robotaxi fleet. “Tesla AI’s Teleoperation team is charged with providing remote access to our robotaxis and humanoid robots,” the listing notes, highlighting an additional need to assist Musk’s nascent line of Tesla robots. “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 listing states.
The job post also notes that such a teleoperation center requires “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.
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.
In general, such methods seem to be part of a broader trend in which companies market their products as “autonomous” or AI-powered, only to later reveal that much of the work that the product does is actually performed 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.
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that their autonomous products are a kind of self-guided magic, but the technology is clearly not there yet. A quick peak behind the curtain has consistently revealed a product base that, at a minimum, is still deeply reliant on human workforces.
