this tech is doing great to devalue workers. drivers, this time.
Same for the delivery bots. They’re all getting some remote control help.
Artificial artificial intelligence
Yay, wireless slave wagies!!
This is way better than Robo Taxi convoys of 2 chase cars following one driverless vehicle. A fraction of the footprint and manpower cost of Musk’s venture.
the same thing happened with that Amazon shop that you could apparently take anything out without checking out and it would automatically charge your account…
turns out they had workers watching the camera footage
This would have actually been a great thing to not only acknowledge but promote if they weren’t so caught up in their own hype.
Not that I will ever get into one of those death traps but if you tell the average consumer that any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator “to keep you moving on your way” they would probably feel better about riding.
I’ve done tele-driving before and it’s remarkably good, even if latency is a concern.
It’s the facade of it all, the need to seem to live up to the hype. It’s going to get more people killed.
I’ve ridden in a few Waymo’s before, in SF they can be more dependable or easier to get than other ride options. I never felt like I was ever in danger in one.
Within my handful of experiences with them I’ve never had to use the help button or features to request assistance from a tele-operator but it was clear that they weren’t trying to hide the function from the passengers as the feature was explained and clearly labeled.
A friend who uses them often told me of the one time he needed to ask for assistance when their Waymo was stuck behind a doordash scooter with its hazard lights on that was either delivering or picking up and blocking a turn lane in downtown SF. The Waymo didn’t know what to do to get around it, my friend hit the button for assistance, a voice came over the speakers asking how they could help, my friend explained the situation and the tele-operator drove the car to safely navigate the situation. He said it was probably 1.5-2mins of tota inconvenience with 75% of that time was him wondering if he should hit the help button or not.
I understand a lot of AI implementation, such as Amazon Fresh or other business models have been hiding offshored human assistance within their “AI” features, which I do agree with you is deceitful but my experience with Waymo was not that. They did not hide or obfuscate that function and feature of the service but actively informed the passenger of its existence.
Granted, I haven’t ridden in one for almost a year at this point and I only did so in the SF market so things may have changed since or are different elsewhere.
Also, I can’t say that I follow the news intently about Waymo, I know they have run over a couple cats but I hadn’t heard anything about them killing people. Has that happened?
Anyone else not very impressed?
AI = Actual International-workers
AI =Actually Indians
AI = Asians Inside
deleted by creator
Someone needs to slap an Asians Inside sticker in the same style as the Intel ones on the Waymos.
And these foreign crowd workers know the local traffic rules? Maybe they even have regular drivers licenses?
Here’s a short video of someone receiving help. They explain briefly that they provide instructions to the vehicle, they don’t do the actual driving
That is like the person steering to avoid a collision while cruise control and lane assist are on, it isn’t actually fully autonomous.
This used to be my job. They’re not controlling the cars. They’re basically completing real-time CAPTCHAs, telling the car whether the cameras see a stop sign, a bicycle, temporary barriers, etc. If the car can’t identify an object that could possibly cross its path, it pulls over and stops until an operator can do a sanity-check on whatever the car’s confused by. They only need to be able to identify objects on the road, not know the rules of the road.
I think the interventions here are more like: “that’s a trash can someone pushed onto the road - let me help you around it” rather than: “let me drive you all the way to your destination.”
It’s usually not the genuinely hard stuff that stumps AI drivers - it’s the really stupid, obvious things it simply never encountered in its training data before.
Saw this blog post recently about waymo’s sim setup for generating synthetic data and they really do seem to be generating pretty much everything in existence. The level of generalization of the model they seem to be using is either shockingly low or they abort immediately at the earliest sign of high perplexity.
Feels like the robot hoovers when they encounter an unexpected poo.
it’s the really stupid, obvious things
Hm. Interesting. But that makes them look even mode incapable than I feared.
Broadly speaking, an AI driver getting stumped means it’s stuck in the middle of the road - while a human driver getting stumped means plowing into a semi truck.
I’d rather be inconvenienced than killed. And from what I’ve seen, even our current AI drivers are already statistically safer than the average human driver - and they’re only going to keep getting better.
They’ll never be flawless though. Nothing is.
Ai drivers have run over and crushed people slowly before too though because they didn’t see the person as an “obstacle” to be avoided, or because they were on the ground, it didn’t see them
And they always will. You need to look at the big picture here, not individual cases. If we replaced every single car on US roads with one driven by AI - proven to be 10 times better a driver than a human - that would still mean 4,000 people getting killed by them each year. That, however, doesn’t mean we should go back to human drivers and 40,000 people killed annually.
You need to look at the big picture here, not individual cases.
We should really be investing in trains and buses, not cars of any type.
I think your logic is flawed. The discussion is about a specific form of transportation. By your own logic, you should be suggesting that people fly everywhere.
I fully agree with you, but there is the issue of robotaxis crashing 3x as often as human drivers - and thats with a human supervisor on board. So if we switched completely to AI cars with the current level of integration, thats 120000 people killed.
That’s Tesla, not Waymo. Tesla’s hardware is shit and does not even include lidar. You can’t judge the entire industry by the worst example.
Tesla made the idiotic decision to rely entirely on cameras, waymo used lidar and other sensors to augment vision.
current AI drivers are already statistically safer than
As long as they use level 3 autonomous cars and then cheat with remote operators instead of using real level 5 cars, such statistics remain quite meaningless.
However, they tell about the people who use them as arguments.
As the OP stated, the low velocity cases are not causing deadly accidents. And you can’t drive by wire at high speed (too much latency). So I doubt it’s affecting the stats in any meaningful way.
Honestly I much prefer they have a human as a backup than not.
As the OP stated, the low velocity cases are not causing deadly accidents.
Make humans drive as slow as these cars and deaths will drop too.
The cars aren’t driving that slow the vast majority of the time…
Can you imagine the lawsuits?
No. I am not from there. Feel free to explain what is possible.
In my country we have a law that requires such remote operators to have a license that is valid here.
(Sadly, we do not require them to reside here)
AI stands for Actually
IndiansFilipinosLet’s get rid of undocumented workers they said
Each worker has a readme now, it’s alright /s
Don’t forget 200 pages of EULA
being “undocumented” or “illegal” is a local bedtime story. It doesn’t apply to people everywhere
Moravy also argued that to stop anybody from taking control of vehicles, the company “actively participates in hacking events
Read this slowly:
Here they admit that their vehicles can be hacked and then remotely cotrolled.
They’re running red team hacking scenarios, an extremely standard, common, and good practice in the cybersecurity industry. Any device, especially one connected to the internet, is at risk of being hacked - it would be naive to assume otherwise, so they’re hiring professionals to penetrate their security before someone else does. This is actually a sign they’re taking security seriously.
Also, from the article: “they do not remotely drive the vehicles”.
Also, from the article: “they do not remotely drive the vehicles”.
You may quote and repeat this as much as you like… ;-)
Do you actually have any evidence Waymo staff can remotely drive their vehicles? Or are you just tilting at windmills? I don’t really appreciate the insinuation that I am some rube by someone evidently unaware of basic cybersecurity concepts.
There are real problems with this arrangement that should be focused on rather than vague speculations - i.e. the exploitation of developing nations by the machine learning/tech industry.
Do you actually have any evidence
I have expressed my belief, or my doubt, however you want to look at it.
someone evidently unaware of basic cybersecurity concepts.
I can assure you that is not the case. I work in IT, all my life, much longer than you, and I know all of it’s basic concepts.
Think: what would happen when such a car gets stuck and the remote operator can’t achieve anything with “giving directions”? He needs some stronger action. Maybe he needs to “escalate” to some “senior”. What would that person do?
There is the possibility of remote steering, and I think they would use it, 10 out of 10 times, instead of telling their passengers that they give up now and everybody must leave the car.
“I work in IT, all my life, much longer than you, and I know all its basic concepts.”
And anyone who’s spent their life working in IT would laugh you out of the room for that sentence. Lost all credibility with that BS.
You and every other conspiracy theorist can express your unevidenced beliefs how you like, this conversation clearly isn’t worth my time.
No. They just end the ride and send somebody from the local depot to drive the car back to the garage.
Source: I was on Waymo’s Fleet Response team for a year doing literally this job that is now outsourced overseas. While the tech exists for full remote steering, NHTSA regulations disallow it, and that’s one of the few agencies that Google actually has to abide by if they want to drive their cars on public roads.
Source: I was on Waymo’s Fleet Response team for a year doing literally this job
Good to hear. Thanks for sharing this.
But still, if I were some higher manager there, then I would probably think a little different than you honest people:
that is now outsourced overseas.
- One of the differences is that these operator people come a lot cheaper now.
NHTSA regulations disallow it
- Another difference is that they won’t ever tell any American what they actually do at their job, because they are on the other side of the globe, where it makes no difference at all if they can spell this 5 letter abbreviation or not.
If it’s connected to internet it can be hacked.
If it’s connected to internet it can be hacked.
Correct, so far.
Only a few years ago it was the usual thing with cars (except Teslas) that their entertainment system was connected to the internet, but everything related to driving was not. Such a thing as hacking and remote driving was fundamentally impossible.
Today, even in the European cars is a whole lot more internet inside. But real remote driving is still not a standard possibility.
“Your kid is safe at school, because we insist all teachers use condoms”
