Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Self-driving cars aren't nearly ready to solve this problem.

Besides the fact that they don't work yet (source: I'm working on it ;), a self-driving car can't bring the food to the door because the veteran is in a wheelchair. It can't knock on the door, have short chat, ask about the wife (who is deceased five years), and when necessary... Call elder care services when the veteran says he just talked to her yesterday.

None of this is part of the formal job description; it's the stuff that keeps real human beings from "falling through the holes" of the social safety net.

There's a lot of the web of government support of people that doesn't scale because the human-to-human contact is part of the point.

View on HN

> Besides the fact that they don't work yet (source: I'm working on it ;)

They don't work everywhere all the time. They clearly exist; they're out there on the roads.

> a self-driving car can't bring the food to the door because the veteran is in a wheelchair.

It could, however, deliver the veteran to their appointment, in the many cases where the path between their home and the VA is one of the ones a self-driving car can already navigate.

Grocery delivery, by contrast, could still be done by a person, but modern logistics technology allows that person to deliver groceries for multiple people with one trip to the store.

> It can't knock on the door, have short chat, ask about the wife (who is deceased five years), and when necessary... Call elder care services when the veteran says he just talked to her yesterday.

That is an entirely different service. To see why, consider the veteran who has that problem but has never needed (or anyway requested) to have groceries delivered.

I don't get your self driving car point. It's just an analogy, or do you believe the government should be buying/using self driving cars?

I am also not sure if grocery delivery is as big of a problem as we are talking about? Does the government even provide grocery delivery?

For groceries: local government liaises with various NGOs that provide meals to older people living alone. The programs go by various names; "Meals on Wheels" is the one Americans likely recognize the most. But most counties or states have some kind of "agency on aging" that will connect to the program and uses the program volunteers as additional community eyes-and-ears.

Meals on Wheels served 2.2 million Americans in 2022.

Many people in wheelchairs cannot navigate entering a transport vehicle and self-securing to the vehicle safely. And that's before we get into the question of who's making van-transport-style SDCs (or SDCs that navigate driveways, for that matter).

There's a lot of the process of elder care that robots can't do yet (and won't be able to do in the next five years) while America's median population age continues to increase. These are human problems best solved by human interaction.

> That is an entirely different service

Personal experience suggests otherwise. A "soft wellness check" is something Meals On Wheels specifically does; they can notify an out-of-state loved one if they notice the client isn't coming to the door or picking up the meals. They can also make the human-being call to say "Everything's mostly fine but your uncle seems kind of... out of it? Not sure if anything's up."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com