Hacker News Reader

Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

...remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets.

This terrifies me. The speed of light RTT from the west coast to India and back again is around 100msec. This is on the order of human reaction time. Real world latency we are talking way more than that. I get wacky routes to India traversing most of the world, so I get pings >400msec from the US to India. 400msec is more than enough latency to kill you. Teleop is a silly idea for big fast death machines on wheels (cars), especially if there’s significant latency in the teleop.

View on HN

Not that I think it'd necessarily be a great idea, but you could probably get a decent bounded latency by using dedicated / leased lines, which is e.g. good enough for remote robot-assisted surgery in some places.

The Earth is 134ms around at the speed of light. That's how long it takes to communicate in real time with the other side of the world (your antipode). No technology or routing policies can change that.

This sort of real-time control would probably have to be done on the same continent at most, because of purely physical limitations.

I think it's worth introducing to the discussion that human reaction time to an unanticipated stimulus is somewhere around 150-250ms. The ~140-150ms practically achievable latency over a hemispheric arc in real world IP networks is already fairly close to the limit imposed by the human element. However, latency in IP networks is measured as RTT while human reaction time to a stimulus is given as the one way path latency. The more accurate comparison would be between the ~70ms one way path latency of the optical terrestrial network with the same 150-250ms of one way path latency for the human to react to a directly applied stimulus. At the extreme of the range of human factors and accounting for the differing scale, human factors are responsible for up to 80% of the reaction latency.

But if you're talking about having human operators in the loop then any communications latency would be in addition to the reaction time of the operator.

What if you make it an anticipated stimulus? E.g. have operators grouped by event kind.

What if it saves a ton of money (for me) and only kills afew not me's.

//The real argument

I strongly believe no one has to die.

Note that "cheaper labor markets" doesn't have to mean overseas. Mexico is only a few hundred miles from many US population centers. And US federal minimum wage is still only $7.25. "Cheaper labor market" for California city jobs could just be Nevada or Utah.

Is that the speed of light in copper/fiber? that's about .5c where c is the speed of light in a vacuum

Reply on news.ycombinator.com