You must log in or # to comment.
Sensationalists and pretty much false headline
I can see why it’s a spicy headline but we should appreciate a human override capability.
Hopefully waymo is forced into transparency about this. Transparency 100% fully clear on when the tech runs into a variety of situations including humans intervening.
That should be a mandatory for them to have the licensing necessary to operate autonomous vehicles anywhere in public spaces.
After all, they are learning on the public’s dime and at the public’s risk. We have to know if it’s truly better and what kind of new risks are created that weren’t otherwise anticipated.
They are transparent about it. A user here has ridden in them and they have signs in the car that say this and they’re is a button to request it if the car is stuck someplace.
The wamo workers when they get stuck look at all the cameras, then plot a safe route the car drives it’s self out of the confusion via. They never remotely drive them.
It’s even less than that. The act of plotting a course (which we called Augmented Trajectories), was used very sparingly, and mostly just to do “illegal” maneuvers like crossing a double yellow line in order to get around debris in the road. The Waymo won’t (knowingly) break the law on its own, even in those exceptional situations like road obstructions, so we could either tell the car “this road is inaccessible due to the obstruction” and let it try to make a 30-point u-turn and reroute itself 8 miles in another direction, or we can tell the car “let me direct you through this tiny lil one-time crime”. ATs are very limited in scope; we could basically plot out several points in the car’s path, and then tell it to drive itself to those points while ignoring other traffic rules, and then the car will complete that course while steering itself along the path you’ve plotted. You can only set a max distance of like 20 meters or so before having to make the car pull over and plot a new AT again, and the car will only ever go about 3 MPH during an AT. Even during an AT, the car will still refuse to drive over anything it doesn’t recognize as safe and will not collide itself with anything at all.
Almost all of the remote dispatcher’s job is just identifying objects (usually road signs, traffic signals, and other vehicles) that the Waymo isn’t able to immediately identify. No remote driving, and very little manual course-plotting is being done by humans.
Source: was a Waymo remote dispatcher for a year and identified tens of thousands of road objects, and conducted maybe 4 ATs in total. They’re very rare. We mostly had to use them in road work areas, where the workers would leave a very complicated temporary path with road cones that the car just couldn’t figure out, or where the cones had fallen over.
Thank you for the insight and write up.
On a completely unrelated note, this type of online conversation is what makes me most pessimistic about LLMs. I’m fairly certain Chozo is a human, but as time goes on it will become much more likely companies will have bots crawling all social media looking for conversations like this as a standard part of their PR team. It will make it impossible to discern truth from hallucination and ultimately just erode trust in everything. It’s such a bleak future.
That’s like saying someone using the steering wheel isn’t driving because the tires actually turn rhe car.
We live in a twenty fucking twenty six. Corporations faking everything with ai, but they still fake that they even use ai. Can the bubble just pop so hard, so that ai can become an economical black hole?
It already is a black hole, and they have sunk billions into it. The only reason any of the ‘AI’ businesses are still afloat is because all the numbers are made up. Everyone is paying everyone with billions they don’t really have. Absolute economics circle jerk in the hopes they can personally enrich themselves at the cost of the planet and everyone living on it.
Nobody cares about your propaganda on this one. Nobody but nerds looking to screech cared if a human steps in to correct a situation. The world runs on shit like this.
