This was from congressional testimony this past week by executives from Waymo and Tesla, video and automated transcript here: https://www.c-span.org/program/senate-committee/tesla-and-wa...
Waymo's article from 2024 about these operations (“much like phone-a-friend”): https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
This headline implies this assistance is a new revelation when the only part that might be new is that it's now also being outsourced to the Philippines.
I was once in a waymo stopped at a red light. Prior to the light turning green I felt a split second where the car's brake had been released, anticipating the change and then accelerating immediately when the light changed.
Since this experience I've just assumed all waymos have some warehoused human drone pilot actually controlling it.
Waymo remote operators cannot drive the car
how do you know ?
Physics. Have you ever played a competitive/reaction based video game with high ping? It is very, very hard. And it’s a game, where there are many tricks to hide latency from you.
Cloud console shows pings between Google data centers in us-west and ones that are in proximity of Philippines around 160-200ms. Then you also have inherent lag of wireless connection itself. Then you have also connectivity from google’s data center to Philippines.
If you want remote driving in uncontrolled environment, you reasonably can expect only the same city/county operators.
I’m obviously uninformed, but I’d expect the remote operators job (from another country) to be like “car is safe to proceed, based on that picture that I see” or, in the worst case scenario, put some waypoints in the ui and let car drive on its own.
It would be a certifiably insane model with the latency and failure modes involved, for a start.
There are many other possibilities such as the system having learned the timings or another vehicle in the fleet observing the lights turn red at the other part of the junction.
The least likely possibility is a person controlling the vehicle directly over a variable latency connection that may fail completely at any time.
Behind all the new smart city tech I encountered here in Shenzhen and Shanghai are actually human operators (drones, cars, vending machines). You can find the job ads online.
I’m sure there are, but direct remote control of throttle, brakes etc in vehicles is _hopefully_ not part of that.
I could see certain situations where it could be authorised when a vehicle is stranded and unable to operate autonomously at all due to an error, but it would have to be extremely slow speed with a full-stop failsale on connection drop or high-latency detection.
That said I bet there are some who do not consider the safety implications and “move fast and break people”
Why would you assume this from that experience?
Having physical brains in the loop seems like a good thing.
I think some are wondering if these overseas employees are driving cars in the US without a US driver's license.
They aren't driving the cars. If someone is giving you advice from the backseat, do they need a driver's license?
> “They provide guidance. They do not remotely drive the vehicles,” Peña told the Senate committee. “The Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input.”
I think everyone knew this and is comforted by it. I’d be concerned if there weren’t humans ready to guide or take over. The company we should all be concerned about is Tesla, and their irresponsible way of falsely advertising full self driving capabilities. Who knows what those robotaxis are capable of.
Ok, and?
People are somewhat surprised about this work being farmed out to the Philippines as opposed to being done by Americans. I'm pretty sure you don't need me to explain this, though.
Then they’re not really self driving are they?
The assistants don't have access to the gas pedal or steering wheel input. The car is the only thing actually piloting the car i.e. self driving
* Unless it gets super stuck, then a human drives out and gets into the physical driver seat and takes over
My assumption is they can provide input such as "you should make a left/right lane change" to get out of a "stuck" location.
So when the car's systems prevent it from taking a specific action, they can override it for a single instance.
Do they have driver's licenses from a US state?
Waymo has a blog post on what these remote assistance people do: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
They effectively are answering questions like "is this road closed", or "is the object in front of me a solid object or a weird shadow".
These are not the sort of questions that US driver's license is really related to, it's not things like "can I legally turn right on red at this intersection".
Do we require a driver's license to solve Google reCapture questions like "what squares have a bike in them"? Because the waymo stuff is closer to image classification than driving.
Is Waymo software licensed by a dmv ?
Yes. Something you should intuit, and is eaisly confirmed with a quick search. It is licensed to drive and the conditions underwhich it may do so are clearly stipulated. If it didnt require a license elon would have his deathtraps littering roadsides with mangled flesh and steel everywhere. Perhaps ask yourself why you asked such a misguided question and consider what you can do different in your cognitive patternd to avoid it in the future.
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You've imagined a scenario around remote drivers having access to the internal microphones.
Waymo tells you explicitly that all the microphones inside the car are off unless you press the button to call rider support yourself.
If you'd ever ridden in waymo, perhaps you'd recall them telling you that the first time you rode one.
> if you can't think of more perhaps you should keep your comments out of the discussion, because at present you've contributed nothing but ignorance.
You really shouldn't end your comment with that if you're not going to read up on whether a hypothetical scenario you've imagined up is ignorant or not.
have you read terms and conditions? They can access video under near any circumstance, like wanting to check the general cleanliness of the car etc. audio is a bit different, or so they say, but when it comes to companies like this can we really trust what they say? They have an awful habit of lying an awful lot when it comes to data and privacy. Tesla for example recently got in trouble for not really doing as they should regarding sensors, if you recall. Waymo is several leagues above tesla in terms of general professionalism, however, I don't know if they professional enough to not do things they shouldn't, or under-employ folks in charge of implementing barriers to abuse etc.