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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

Because if they ever become super popular, it will be prohibitively expensive to actually police all the surveillance. Likely to store / process it all. AI does an alright job summarizing videos today (Gemini Flash) but it has to get a lot better if they're going to actually police at scale.

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You think? Checking for significant differences between before and after images doesn’t even need AI. Have a triaging system, something like: image diff -> AI assessment -> human assessment -> car drives to human cleaner. In time you can streamline significantly.

I think simple solutions exist. For example the waymo could just ask the rider at the beginning of the ride “Is your car smelly? Any trash in the car?”

If they reply YES to any of those questions, then google keeps the recording of the previous ride for later review. Simple, no?

If the car actually was dirty, give the person that said “car was dirty” a refund of 20% on their ride. Then charge the party that made the car dirty a few. If a person is found to consistently say cars are dirty when they are not, give them a warning and consider kicking them off the platform (abuse).

Alternatively google can switch from recording the first minute of the ride to the last minute of the ride. In other words, only look at the “delta” to compare the car state. That would require a lot less video storage and less effort to review.

You realize that this will just cause people to answer, "yes, it smells like urine" and then pee in the car?

Do you think that many people pre-plan peeing in the car?

No it won’t. The problem is already solved, event detection is AI from 10 years ago, let alone today. Rider puked in the car isn’t that hard, they can add smell sensors also.

it's actually pretty easy to automate the state of the vehicle. if anything is left in the car the video is sent to an operator. The service instructs a cleaner to check the car and the passenger is sent a warning and eventually is banned from using the service.

And when margins compress the first thing that will go is the threshold for cleaning. Cleaning is not just expensive in labor but also taking a car out of circulation. All incentives point towards lowering standards to the absolute minimum people will tolerate.

The car drives itself to a cleaning station, or it is scheduled to be cleaned while charging. I don’t get why you think it will just be a race to the bottom and all common sense will be thrown out the window.

Margins aren't going to compress for some time considering that Waymo's only competition is human-operated driving services.

Competitors that require a $10k car and minimum wage, not a $500k car. That's a lot of margin to make up.

The next rider will alert if something outrageous has happened.

No, most people would just move on and stop using the service. A very small % of users report issues.

Incentivize reporting with a discount, combine that with review of video to verify it’s not a false report. Maybe not scalable, but could work.

Image recognition is getting better. I rarely have to get my receipt checked at Sam’s Club anymore now that their camera exit thing is in full swing.

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