Why does it matter if fleet response sit in Manilla, Miami or Milan?
Surely what matters is the architecture:
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Waymo tell us that fleet response agents can only provide waypoint suggestions, they don't have steer-by-wire remote control of the vehicle.
fragmede 50 days ago [-]
The money flow matters. It matters because those are jobs that Americans aren't getting. That friend of yours in the US that down on their luck and looking for a job? That's a job they could be doing. The Everyone driving for Uber could be doing it from their living room in the US. The money that Waymo riders are spending is going to other countries, not America. I'd pay more for an all American company who had remote drivers in the US.
yakikka 49 days ago [-]
The US intentionally keeps its unemployment at the current rate to keep labor costs down. If your friend can't get general skills jobs it means the average job in the US will pay more and the total of all pay in the US will be more.
I think the US should stop being so abusive and mean given how damn rich it is.
readthenotes1 52 days ago [-]
I'd trust Manilla drivers over Miami drivers any day. They are tempered in a hotter furnace
fragmede 50 days ago [-]
Having been to all three, driving in Miami and San Francisco is child's play compared to driving in Manila. Driving in Asia is a whole other ball game. There are no rules, and honking is a "hey I'm here" every couple of minutes. LA freeway raffic ain't got nothing on Manilla.
simonw 52 days ago [-]
Right, I don't think it matters at all.
mothballed 52 days ago [-]
Kids in the PI are much better at paying attention to traffic, because it is utter fucking chaos in Manila, routing by a school is not particularly interesting. So they might feel better about providing waypoint near a school in the US than an American person would -- not realizing US children are comparatively retarded to Filipino children in dealing with traffic.
exidy 50 days ago [-]
I'm sure no ill intent on your part but referring to the Philippines as "The PI" (short for The Philippine Islands as it was known under US colonial administration) is roughly equivalent to calling Thailand "Siam" or Sri Lanka "Ceylon".
Since 1946 the country has simply been known as the Philippines, officially "the Republic of the Philippines" and the ISO 3166 code is PH.
49 days ago [-]
jjpones 50 days ago [-]
As a (somewhat younger) Filipino, I didn't even know there was any basis in calling my country "The PI". Well now I know.
exidy 50 days ago [-]
It's a direct translation of Las Islas Filipinas which dates it back to the Spanish colonial era.
WarmWash 52 days ago [-]
Anything for a clickable headline...
stcredzero 52 days ago [-]
It's been speculated: Is this why there was that debacle with multiple Waymos in intersections during the recent blackout?
While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.
teach 52 days ago [-]
I've seen this story making the rounds, but this isn't news, is it?
All self-driving companies maintain teams that make a decision when the cars get confused or stuck, and they report the number of such handoffs to NHTSA.
Is it just that there are teams in the Philippines specifically?
1) "Often" is a gross mischaracterization. It's so infrequent you wouldn't believe. Nearly all rides are performed fully autonomously without human intervention. But "often" sure sounds spicy!
2) "its autopilot is just guys from the Philippines": no, it's not. A human is in the loop to help hint to the Waymo Driver AI platform what action to take if its confidence level is too low or it's facing a particularly odd edge case where it needs to be nudged to take an alternate route. This framing makes it sound like some dude in Manilla is remote controlling the car. They're not. They're issuing hints to and confirming choices by the Waymo Driver which remains in full control of the vehicle at all times.
Because lay people, even non-technically-sophisticated lay people naturally start wondering "well, isn't there some delay between a person in the Philippines and the car in the US? how could that be safe? what if the internet dips out or the connection drops?" Which are good and valid points! And why this framing is so obnoxious and lazy. The car is always driving itself.
They finally issued a correction in the linked article that makes it clear they're not remote controlling the cars, but the headline is still really slanted and a frustrating framing. When you ride in these things, you can see just how incredible this technology is and how far we've come.
bsimpson 52 days ago [-]
There's also the implicit xenophobia/offshoring angle that people in a call center in the Philippines must be doing low quality work and/or being exploited.
tbrownaw 52 days ago [-]
I think people tend to distrust an assumed lowest bidder regardless of whether they're from here or from over there.
seanmcdirmid 52 days ago [-]
I would guess they are not only getting lower rates in the Philippines, but better service than they could get in the states.
hsbauauvhabzb 52 days ago [-]
Because outsourced work is often a race to the bottom price wise, resulting in skilled workers finding better higher paying work elsewhere?
There are highly talented people in every country. The vast majority of them do not work in call centres.
BobbyTables2 52 days ago [-]
Well they are being exploited for potentially illegal purposes.
Forget self driving cars for a minute. If Domino’s wants to deliver a pizza to me, the delivery car driver needs to be licensed (pretty much in that state).
It doesn’t matter even if Domino’s extends some sort of liability insurance. Laws are laws. Legally driver must be licensed. It doesn’t matter if they drive while on a speakerphone call with a licensed driver.
It also wouldn’t matter if the delivery driver had no license but carried a licensed passenger at all times. It wouldn’t matter even if the passenger owned the car.
Having a person drive a car in a country in which they are not licensed to drive seems fundamentally illegal. It’s not a technology issue. It doesn’t matter if there are sensors and satellite links involved. The driver must be licensed.
Somehow society had decided in favor of a little convenience to forget all principles and let tech companies run roughshod over laws, societal norms, and basic human decency.
This is worse than the 1970s mentality of “if it came from the computer it must be correct”. Now it is AI…
peyton 52 days ago [-]
Should probably be licensed to drive in the US if “explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider” as Waymo has disclosed…
I would not personally be comfortable “explicitly proposing a path” for a vehicle operating in the Philippines since I’ve never even been there, let alone driven there. Why would I be comfortable with somebody doing the reverse?
gjm11 52 days ago [-]
It seems possible that people in the Philippines providing advice to Waymo vehicles in the US get some training on US road signage, traffic regulations, etc. (I can't see how it would make any sense for Waymo to pay people to do this and not give them the information they need to do it reasonably well, since the whole point is for them to handle difficult cases.)
Brybry 52 days ago [-]
And it would be difficult for whatever training Waymo provides to its employees to be less stringent than the lax license requirements of most US states.
catlikesshrimp 52 days ago [-]
Super interesting take you mentiom.
Tourists can drive in the US on their foreign license. Can that be used as a loophole for a call center?
Also, maybe it is a gray area where they are not asking what they don't want to hear. Those offshore subcontractors already break any US law they want because they aren't hiring humans inside the US, they are providing a service from abroad.
Specifically, how do you know the operator can drive?, as you ask. But also, how do you know your operator won't steal your PII / bank account details out of your law enforcement physical jurisdiction?
52 days ago [-]
legostormtroopr 52 days ago [-]
Why is it xenophobic to be concerned that non-registered drivers in one country are being allowed to drive remotely in a different country.
MostlyStable 52 days ago [-]
As far as I understand it, they aren't being allowed to drive. They are doing the equivalent of "ignore that, it's not a real obstacle" or "try to go around this way", and then the car takes that input into account and does the actual driving (steering, control of throttle/brake) on it's own as usual.
dataflow 52 days ago [-]
You're saying they don't interpret road signs/markings/etc.? Or need to know if e.g. a right or left turn on red is legal in a given intersection?
rcxdude 52 days ago [-]
I don't need, legally, to demonstrate any knowledge of this to drive on US roads currently (or even, strictly speaking, to know what side of the road I should drive on).
tbrownaw 52 days ago [-]
It's been quite a while, but I'm pretty sure there was a written part back when I did the driving test for my first license.
rcxdude 52 days ago [-]
Yeah (at least, that's probably the case in some parts of the US), but I didn't pass my test in the US.
MostlyStable 52 days ago [-]
No, I'm saying that no one should be "concerned that non-registered drivers in one country are being allowed to drive remotely in a different country" because they aren't driving.
agumonkey 52 days ago [-]
It might be for non road code level issues, like physics / crowd ambiguity, where a normal human could fill the missing gaps, US citizen or not.
52 days ago [-]
dylan604 52 days ago [-]
One that I heard a lot is that if you're in the US during the day talking to an offshored tech support person, it's the middle of the night for them. The A-team doesn't work overnight, so you're getting at best second tier. blah blah
catlikesshrimp 52 days ago [-]
The guy says there are workers abroad, not exclusively in Phillipines. Phillipine call centers work when it is night in the US. There almost certainly is /are other centers in another location which work when it is daytime in the US.
Because Night shifts are always more expensive. Nothing to do with any A, B or C Team.
Edir: "Markey then asked about where the operators are located, to which Peña says they have "some in the U.S. and some abroad,” however he did not know an exact percentage of those located elsewhere. "
WillPostForFood 52 days ago [-]
The way the Waymo rep answered strongly implied they only have workers on this task in the The Philippines.
--
Markey: In what countries are these employees located?
Waymo guy: The Philippines.
Markey: Excuse me?
Waymo guy: the Philippines.
Markey: So they are in the Philippines.
----
If they aren't in the Philippines, they need to fire Waymo guy..
catlikesshrimp 52 days ago [-]
He gave a non answer, quite surely on purpose. Since the interviewer didn't explicitly ask "Only in the Phillipines?", I can see the guy retorting "I never said there weren't operators in other places" (again, without saying which other places, or even if there is any other place)
WillPostForFood 51 days ago [-]
Definitely possible, but the more likely answer is that the Phillipines is the only foreign country with operators.
TurdF3rguson 52 days ago [-]
It probably has more to do with the fact that Filipinos speak english. There's no other countries like that in Asia. I mean, Singapore I guess, but they're busy with their own things.
jcranmer 52 days ago [-]
I think it is more specifically that Filipinos tend to speak English with a more American accent, unlike English-speakers in (say) India.
BobbyTables2 52 days ago [-]
Well people in India drive on the left side of the road… That’s not going to work out well when controlling a car in the US…
(Their societal norms regarding driving habits also aren’t going to be an asset)
seanmcdirmid 52 days ago [-]
They are only doing top down way point direction, so it wouldn't really matter since they aren't driving the car.
seanmcdirmid 52 days ago [-]
Thailand has good enough English, but is probably too expensive with wages on par with China.
TurdF3rguson 51 days ago [-]
Thailand doesn't have good enough English to make call centers there viable.
52 days ago [-]
OGEnthusiast 52 days ago [-]
Why is it xenophobia if it could be true?
GuinansEyebrows 52 days ago [-]
as someone with zero love for waymo/alphabet, why would you believe it to be true?
OGEnthusiast 52 days ago [-]
I'm not saying it's true or not true, I'm saying I don't know what "xenophobia" has to do with evaluating the quality of workers being used in potentially life-saving situations.
tialaramex 52 days ago [-]
I'd have a way easier time buying the idea that there's genuine concern for the quality of this work if say, few Americans old enough to do so were licensed to drive. But er, actually it's estimated at almost 90% because the standards are extremely lax.
What "potentially life-saving situations" are you envisioning?
Nobody had mentioned any evaluation of anything. The Grandparent mentioned that xenophobia makes the headline more spicy. "Remote operator" phrase is not as attractive as "Remote operators from Phillipines" or even "Pinoys" can be.
Edit: "They finally issued a correction in the linked article that makes it clear they're not remote controlling the cars, but the headline is still really slanted and a frustrating framing"
danielmarkbruce 52 days ago [-]
If you think they are doing bad work because they are in country X for any X, it's xenophobia.
jayd16 52 days ago [-]
Offshoring our good, American, pretending to be a robot car jobs.
amiga386 52 days ago [-]
They are being exploited. They live in a lower cost-of-living country than where their services are rendered, and so neither demand nor receive the same wages as someone in the USA. The contracting company profits - quite intentionally! - from labour arbitrage.
The Western companies who employ or contract people in these other countries aren't altruistically investing. They're on the hunt for people who will accept lower wages, and for governments that won't insist on workers rights, health and safety.
hackable_sand 52 days ago [-]
They should be paid American wages
JumpCrisscross 52 days ago [-]
> They are being exploited. They live in a lower cost-of-living country
So tech companies should be barred from hiring anyone outside the Bay Area? Because hiring someone in Texas or Arizona is necessarily exploitation?
amiga386 51 days ago [-]
Hiring specifically in Texas or Arizona because you heard it's lower cost-of-living than the Bay Area, and not being willing to offer Bay Area salaries to people there... that's still exploitation.
If you were instead hiring from anywhere (because you'd be happy with a remote worker, and they have the same employment rights) and willing to pay the same as you'd pay your Bay Area workers, i.e. it's about the hunt for talented/capable employees whereever they might be, rather than a hunt for cheap ones, that's no longer exploitation.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
Shouldn't pay be scaled to the locale? Note also the role here is fungible- Waymo could move to another location if they chose.
OGEnthusiast 52 days ago [-]
Yeah but ironically it's actually the workers in the US who are being exploited. The workers in the developing countries are largely beneficiaries since they get access to wages and a labor market far beyond their local region. (Obviously the companies still benefit the most.)
nathanaldensr 52 days ago [-]
They are being exploited. I've traveled to Cebu City where many of these call centers are located. My wife is from the area. To Filipinos, it's a good job, but the quality of life for these workers is still very poor. It's not a living wage; most can't afford to live on their own.
simonw 52 days ago [-]
"most can't afford to live on their own"
That's true for a lot of workers in many USA cities as well.
TurdF3rguson 52 days ago [-]
It's a good job but they can't live on it? I think you mean they can't live like westerners.
orwin 51 days ago [-]
No, I have a friend from Madagascar where they have the same type of 'jobs' (basically classifying stuff for AI, or checking reported images to see if it's porn or worse). It is a 'good job' in the sense that it's a 'desk' job you can do at home that also signal education, so it's social value is high. It is also very 'competitive' so the pay is low and the hours to live on it approach 90/week (it's a 12h/day job)
TurdF3rguson 51 days ago [-]
No I'm familiar with the call center jobs op means, they're good paying (for the region) but you have to go in to the physical location in the city. Which usually means paying rent or a long commute.
124816 52 days ago [-]
It's not lazy framing, this is what "journalism" is now. Push your agenda as far as you can, misrepresenting as many facts as you like. At the very end of your story -- which >85% will never get to -- walk back your misdirections with a paragraph or two of facts, right next to your bolded "sign up" text. None of this is unintentional or accidental.
mnky9800n 52 days ago [-]
I think in response to the propaganda and opinion that has been passed as journalism there are very compelling new journalism outlets like bellingcat. So there is hope and probably space for journalism that fills this gap.
padjo 52 days ago [-]
If it's so infrequent why do they need to offshore it?
loeg 52 days ago [-]
Infrequent things happen all the time at scale?
strange_quark 52 days ago [-]
Their scale is like 2000 cars…
lern_too_spel 52 days ago [-]
They're scaling exponentially, so they have to plan operations accordingly.
fyredge 52 days ago [-]
A. ML engineers don't want to do it
B. Phillipine labellers are way cheaper
C. All of the above
snowwrestler 52 days ago [-]
Time zone coverage would be an obvious reason to have overseas teams.
dymk 52 days ago [-]
Because it's cheaper, duh
bigwheels 52 days ago [-]
The fleet of human operators manage many details of Waymo rides.
* Interpreting traffic laws
* Managing construction
* Navigating unusual intersections
* Re-routing due to traffic or other unusual conditions
* Safety threshold intervene
steveBK123 52 days ago [-]
Well one concern could be something like - ride share companies already extracted a lot of the profit share of local taxi companies out of their local economies and moved it to Silicon Valley. But at least there were local jobs so a good amount of money stayed in the local economy.
Now with driverless all the money leaves the local economy to go to Silicon Valley. And then what human labor is required is then offshored.
turtlesdown11 52 days ago [-]
I assume you have sources for the claims you're making above? Like actual data on the number of people employed doing this work, how often they "guide" the car, etc? Otherwise it's hard to believe your claims.
Interesting, an immediate downvote asking for sources.
OGEnthusiast 52 days ago [-]
> It's so infrequent you wouldn't believe
Is there a publicly disclosed number we can use to verify this claim?
bobsomers 52 days ago [-]
This is purely anecdotal but I've heard from other riders that the car tells you when it's happening, and it's never happened in my 10+ rides so far.
RupertSalt 51 days ago [-]
Yes, the display will chime and indicate "We're working to help you get moving again" and "Sit tight and keep your seatbelt fastened." Support may call in if necessary. Or if you've reached out to Support, they'll explain that they're going to send a command to the vehicle or modify the route.
It's not unusual and it's quite a routine mode. It will happen if there's a jam in front of you, like a parking lot or narrow passage. Twice, we were behind a marked police car that was sort of double-parked. You'll know Support is imminent when the car is hesitating, and the virtual reality may indicate multiple-choice paths.
It happened to me once today at a "valet parking" stand, in a very busy drop-off circle. (I traveled about 25 miles.) I was also cracking up, because it chose a lot of backroads for the routes, which could've been done on arterials. So I was treated to a real "scenic route" at no extra charge. But Support never called in, and the delay so brief, I am unsure whether their input was necessary to clear the way.
I did once receive a human driver to move the car. The dropoff was in the wrong United States lot, and when I told them I couldn't exit there, they said the battery was so low it needed the American Depot ASAP and wouldn't obey, so an American human was dispatched from The United States of America, and moved it a couple hundred yards... or meters, if you're Pinoy. It was a distinct process for her to climb in and disengage the Waymo Driver, but otherwise just a normal American thing. I mean, she was required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, show her ID to the camera, and finish by singing the Star-Spangled Banner, but otherwise it was normal, and could've happened anywhere. God Bless Waymo.
pydry 52 days ago [-]
"So infrequent that we wouldnt believe" and yet in order to save costs they had to use humans from the Phillipines?
groundtruthdev 52 days ago [-]
This defense is missing the point. Yes, humans aren’t remote-driving the cars, and yes, most miles are autonomous. But the relevant question isn’t how often a human intervenes — it’s how many humans must be continuously available for the system to function at all. Even if interventions are rare, Waymo still needs operators on shift, fully alert, low-latency, and trained for local conditions, and that cost exists whether they’re doing something or not. Capacity planning is driven by correlated failures, not averages: blackouts, construction, special events, and weather can cause many vehicles to request help at once, and we’ve already seen queues form. That means the human layer is sized for worst-case concurrency, not “99.99% of miles.” So no, it’s not “just guys in the Philippines driving cars,” but it’s also not “so infrequent you wouldn’t believe.” It’s a highly autonomous system with a permanent human ops shadow, and the fact that this work is offshored strongly suggests that shadow is economically material. Miles are autonomous. Ops are not.
kccqzy 52 days ago [-]
Yes it’s just because of the Philippines. The mention of the Philippines is triggering some additional scrutiny. When Waymo themselves announced this back in 2024[1] they made no mention of the country where these humans are located. Now people are raising questions about data sovereignty and local training such as U.S. driving license. Or if you are cynic you can say it’s xenophobia.
Partially, but also as an easy attack on "bad big tech" and AI - it wins votes right as primary season starts gearing up [1] during what is being treated by both the DNC and the GOP as a highly competitive election [0].
Ed Markey is going to face a severely harsh primary this election cycle (as are other incumbents in both parties this season).
Yes, I think this is counting on the ignorance that people will believe there are "drone operators" at the console, halfway across the world, who are driving our cars [A.I. stands for "Actually Indians"?]
The way I understood the liability conversation, several years ago, was that each "autonomous vehicle" would have a corresponding operator of record, a licensed driver, who would be the responsible person for the vehicle's behavior. That there would be a designated person to carry insurance and licensing and be personally responsible and personally answer to criminal or civil charges if "their" vehicle got in a fix.
Honestly this model doesn't make any sense, as Waymo has set it up so that the only driver is the Waymo Driver making decisions, because the Waymo Driver is the only one who's privy to 100% the real-time data.
The remote CSRs, whether they're in Philippines or stateside engineers on an escalation, are explicitly not driving the car but giving it suggestions. If they need someone to "drive the car" they literally dispatch a human who gets behind the wheel, and that's how it works.
turtlesdown11 52 days ago [-]
>Yes, I think this is counting on the ignorance that people will believe there are "drone operators" at the console, halfway across the world, who are driving our cars [A.I. stands for "Actually Indians"?]
...
>Honestly this model doesn't make any sense, as Waymo has set it up so that the only driver is the Waymo Driver making decisions, because the Waymo Driver is the only one who's privy to 100% the real-time data.
Their competitor Telsa does use teleoperation in their "robotaxis"? So what is ignorant about believing it to be the case in this scenario?
The article you link literally says that Tesla's teleoperation is the same kind as Waymo's, and there is nothing that the company has ever deployed that will enable "remote drone operators" so I don't know what your point is.
Tesla and Waymo both offer systems to provide sensor insight to remote observers, and the remote observers can send suggestions and nudges to the vehicles. The general public does not understand the nuance here, and they imagine someone is sitting with a steering wheel and pedals, like a radio-controlled toy or a USAF Reaper drone.
lern_too_spel 52 days ago [-]
The article says this about the job:
> Our remote operators are transported into the device’s world using a state-of-the-art VR rig that allows them to remotely perform complex and intricate tasks. Working with hardware teams, you will drive requirements, make design decisions and implement software integration for this custom teleoperation system.
The article notes that this is very unlike what Waymo is doing:
> This should enable Tesla to launch a service similar to Waymo without having to achieve a “superhuman level of miles between disengagement.”
RupertSalt 52 days ago [-]
> similar to Waymo
> taking a page out of Waymo’s book
> something that [...] Waymo has already deployed
> one thing that Tesla is taking from Waymo’s approach
> interesting to learn the level of teleoperation Tesla plans to deploy
Basically, this article you linked is reporting only on a job description. The job posting is for an engineer, not a teleoperator! The job posting touts the VR environment that will be used to "drive requirements", not vehicles! What company would hire a highly-skilled and credentialed engineer to be a drone pilot? It is absurd.
The general public may not fully understand this nuance. The entire point of autonomous operation is to remove humans from the decision loop and permit the machine to use its own sensors to make rapid decisions in real-time. As autonomy is refined, remote operators will intervene less and less. And as sensors are refined, humans will have less insight than the AI onboard, due to our inability to directly process those signals.
The author does not know "what level" of teleops Tesla wants to implement. But why even attempt to implement FSD or top-level autonomy, if your operators are doing the driving anyway?
This would never scale. We already discussed the incident where Waymo's disengagement overwhelmed their remote techs and it was an undesirable edge-case. In order to operate a robotaxi fleet, the disengages and takeovers need to be safe, legal, and rare.
lern_too_spel 51 days ago [-]
> The job posting touts the VR environment that will be used to "drive requirements", not vehicles!
No, it says it will bring the user into the vehicle. They are driving requirements for building this telepoerating system. The role description couldn't be more clear.
> What company would hire a highly-skilled and credentialed engineer to be a drone pilot?
They're hiring an engineer to build the VR driving system, not to operate it.
> But why even attempt to implement FSD or top-level autonomy, if your operators are doing the driving anyway?
Obviously, they would like to remove the need for the teleoperators, just like Waymo would like to remove the need for its driver assistants, but Tesla is nowhere near being able to do that.
> This would never scale.
You know it. I know it. This is just to fool Cathie Wood into believing that robotaxi works for long enough until they can get Optimus working. Then if they're behind on Optimus, they'll presumably have backup teleoperators for those in small deployments (just like they're doing with robotaxi now) until they can get the next big thing working or until SpaceX buys out Tesla.
RupertSalt 51 days ago [-]
I'm sorry sir, but you cannot simply walk into the Argument Clinic and begin agreeing with everyone!
umanwizard 52 days ago [-]
Maybe A.I. needs to be updated to stand for “Actually Islanders”, now.
(I’m kidding, of course — you’re right that the Actually Indians meme is a gross distortion of reality.)
OgsyedIE 52 days ago [-]
It's the question of whether these teams are composed of people who can pass a driving test in Waymo's areas of operation. I would be doubtful that they aren't but there appears to be no way for external verification of any kind.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
The scope of their actions does not require them to have passed a driver's test.
dataflow 52 days ago [-]
I'm skeptical of this. Something as simple as knowing the meaning of curb painting color, turning on red, or knowing when to move past an emergency or other special vehicle requires non-universal knowledge of regulations, sometimes hyper-local. The idea that nothing they do would be affected by country-specific regulations is dubious.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
Taking a driver's test, and knowing the meanings of road symbols are two different things. At no time did I imply the workers are completely ignorant of locale-specific driving details- I imagine they receive extensive training on this, but do not take a driver's test per se.
jayd16 52 days ago [-]
They're only in a few hyper-local areas.
blibble 52 days ago [-]
so they can't induce movement of the vehicle, at all, ever?
that's probably fine then
but if they can at all: they need a driving license
it is not unreasonable for a state to want to control who is allowed to move around 1.5 tonnes of metal in a public environment
offnominal 52 days ago [-]
This is analogous to a situation where a passenger in a vehicle, for example, asks the driver to pull over or to drive to a given spot. I believe the passenger does not need to have a driving license to perform this task.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
I have no specific knowledge of the law or the tech requirements here, but I don't think that the state of CA makes Google get CA driving licenses for its phillipines service employees.
atq2119 52 days ago [-]
There may be an is/ought confusion in your exchange.
It is probably true that California has no such law today. It's also true that regulation always takes a while to catch up to technological advances, and so there is a useful, separate conversation to be had about whether California (and anywhere else) ought to have such a law.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
To be clear, California's legislators are paying close attention to Waymo, both because it's being deployed in their major cities, and because Alphabet is a California company.
Depending on which legislator you listen to, Waymo is either the devil that is constantly running people and cats down everywhere, or savior that will rapidly replace all human drivers because it's safer. At least for now, they are keeping a fairly light touch on the legislation for self-driving cars, both because they want to see the technology expand without unnecessary regulation, and because they want to know what the baseline fatality rate is compared to humans.
Likely when the image is clearer (personally I expect that self-driving will expand to all major US cities, and also demonstrate that it is safer than humans) they will find some regulation around remote operator qualifications.
catlikesshrimp 52 days ago [-]
For the time being, they have a free colorless "foreign inept CSR which we don't employ" card when something happen; something always happens given enough time.
jeffbee 52 days ago [-]
The remote operators are not called upon to answer matters of law.
Retric 52 days ago [-]
Moving a car on public streets is a matter of law even if the car is interpreting moderately high level directions like make a U turn here.
Especially as the car is already having issues when they takeover.
verdverm 52 days ago [-]
They aren't moving the car, they are answering customer calls and clicking waypoints on a map to unstuck the car when it phones home "I'm confused"
It's click bait for people's priors
Retric 52 days ago [-]
Those waypoints have legal implications.
It’s often illegal to make a U-Turn to avoid a police checkpoint for example. There’s no way someone can unstick a confused car without being able to make legally relevant choices.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
In California (and I think most places) it's not illegal to make a (legal) U-turn to avoid a police checkpoint or otherwise avoid a checkpoint.
Retric 52 days ago [-]
Waymo is operating in many locations outside of California such as Florida and Texas, and it intends to expand to many more states.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
It is also legal to u-turn before a police checkpoint in Florida and Texas. In fact I think it's true to say that you can do this in any state.
Retric 52 days ago [-]
If you see a checkpoint at sufficient distance to make a legal u turn before interacting with the police yes.
If a police officer is pointing at your car because they are going to search you no.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
So?
You made a series of factually incorrect statements which I have debunked based on trivially determined facts.
Retric 52 days ago [-]
So I realized you misunderstood what I said.
For example, I said they operate in Texas as you called out California as your example. Texas doesn’t allow sobriety checkpoints but it’s an entirely new states worth of legal issues here.
circuit10 52 days ago [-]
I would assume that unsticking it requires forcing it to do maneuvers that it would otherwise refuse to do (or it would just unstick itself), so you'd need some knowledge of laws to do that
catmanjan 52 days ago [-]
If someone from the Phillipines clicks waypoints for a drone in Ukraine, is it a warcrime?
52 days ago [-]
turtlesdown11 52 days ago [-]
> answer matters of law
well yes, answering matters of law is the exclusive jurisdiction of judges
stcredzero 52 days ago [-]
There was a big to-do made about this by one senator(?) during the hearing.
Same old same old. Some of them actually know stuff. Others are examples of 20th century "Artificial Intelligence." (Got briefed by their staff.)
thegreatpeter 52 days ago [-]
all self driving companies? are you sure about that?
dwroberts 52 days ago [-]
Think it is a much bigger deal than you’re making out, because we don’t have figures on how often the cars need assistance.
We assume it’s just occasionally but we don’t actually know that. They could be requesting assistance constantly and Waymo would have an incentive to keep that hush-hush. Certainly would not be the first time a big SV company has faked it until they technically worked.
scarmig 52 days ago [-]
We do know it's not all cars constantly, though. The PGE outage in San Francisco proved it, as anytime a Waymo came across a unpowered traffic light, it was configured to ask for assistance. This led to disaster, as there weren't close to enough humans to provide guidance to all the Waymos.
dwroberts 52 days ago [-]
This is not proof of anything, it’s just an explanation that Waymo provided. We have no way of validating any part of that is true.
The way the cars behaved during the power outage could have been the result of anything - even eg. requiring full remote control and losing connectivity to a local facility
ljm 52 days ago [-]
At worst, it's the outsourcing of cab drivers to remote roles in cheaper countries. No problem for the investors who are banking on another market disruption, since they're leaving the local society to hold the bag.
jonplackett 52 days ago [-]
Just been reading about the crash they’re talking about in the article - it seems like a kid walked out from between two parked cars.
Rather than being a bad thing, this is probably Waymo saving his life.
It says the car reduced speed from 17mph to 6mph before contact. This is the kind of reaction-speed safety an AI car should have over a human driver - instead it’s just ‘waymo hit a kid’.
TurdF3rguson 52 days ago [-]
Reducing speed is great, but isn't a swerve called for in that situation?
unsnap_biceps 52 days ago [-]
Do we know if there was space to swerve? I'm wondering if there was a vehicle next to the car, would swerving into it help slow down the Waymo or would it cause lose of breaking power and end up hitting the person at a faster speed?
TurdF3rguson 52 days ago [-]
A human doesn't have time to consider all that, it just seems to me that the instinctual move is to swerve. Hopefully the other cars are paying attention and swerve too.
0xDEFACED 52 days ago [-]
not if the swerve would put you headlong into oncoming traffic
TurdF3rguson 52 days ago [-]
It wouldn't be headlong, possibly sidelong though. Seems worth it to save a kid, no?
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
neither cars nor humans are expected to solve trolley problems during real-time incidents.
mothballed 52 days ago [-]
Cars, no, but truckers have been damned for not just sacrificing themselves when their brakes failed. There was a recent incident where a truck had its brakes fail on its way into Denver from the Rockies and killed several people. They should have taken an off ramp, but IIRC, both in public opinion and in court it was argued that failing that they should have just committed suicide by going off the road before they hit a family.
unsnap_biceps 52 days ago [-]
There's a difference in expectation between the reactions of a person that has under 10 seconds to react and a truck driver that had minutes of time to plan, including bypassing an emergency ramp designed specifically for runaway trucks.
After passing the Genesee exit, Aguilera Mederos's truck began to smoke as he passed a runaway truck ramp, without taking it, and instead drifted into the left lane nearly clipping a white Chevy Silverado, and passed the next exit as well. For the next few minutes, Aguilera Mederos reached speeds upwards of 100 miles per hour (161 km/h)[6] and passed the next four exits.
I'm not sure how that's relevant to the discussion. it sounds like there were a lot of heated emotions going around in that court case.
(I try not to pay close attention to lawyer's arguments when they are histrionic)
TurdF3rguson 52 days ago [-]
An AI driver would have done it, that's one point for autonomous driving.
lern_too_spel 52 days ago [-]
Alternatively, maybe the car should have been driving more slowly. There is not enough information to know whether a human driver would have had a better outcome.
unsnap_biceps 52 days ago [-]
17 MPH is already pretty slow. School zones near me have a 25 mph speed limit.
lern_too_spel 51 days ago [-]
If I know kids are likely to be running around, I drive well below the speed limit.
I'm not saying a human driver would have done better. I'm disputing the claim that a human driver would have necessarily done worse. There is not enough information given to reach either conclusion.
nemothekid 52 days ago [-]
The way this is being reported gives the impression that there are workers in the philippines remotely driving these cars (if they are, maybe google found a good use case for all that Stadia tech).
What it actually is, if the car gets stuck someone can manually override - which, I imagine is normal? If the car gets stuck you can call someone and they can do "something", which can probably nudge the car into action. I doubt the latency is that good where someone can remotely drive the car.
bink 52 days ago [-]
What I found interesting about this is that on several occasions I've seen Waymos get confused and block intersections (and once Muni tracks). Each time they've sat there for at least 10-15 mins until a police officer showed up and tapped on the window. Then it was another 10-15 mins before the vehicle started to move again. What are these agents doing?
walkersnice 52 days ago [-]
The police officers operate autonomously 99% of the time, but 1% fall back to a remote worker in the Philippines, sometimes the same agent.
Scheduling overheads account for some of the latency.
This is all compounded with anything vaguely legal, at which point decisions are escalated to legal support.
This has led to a drop in legal disputes, keeps legal costs low, and keeps the courts clear.
Surge pricing in SF applies during periods of low agent availability, such as public holidays in the Philippines, or public discontent in other regions of the world.
Sorry about the intersection though.
hettygreen 52 days ago [-]
Filipino here..
I always wondered why "Taxi Cab Simulator 7" looked so realistic.
52 days ago [-]
52 days ago [-]
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
From what I understand, Waymo has never hidden the fact that they have remote operators, and also they have clarified that the remote operators are not actually "driving" the car (in the sense that they are not using a remote steering wheel and pedals).
I find this fact to be an interesting litmus test- for example, jwz (who hates self-driving cars, AI, and bigtech) interprets the news to mean the opposite of what I said (it's a bunch of remote workers individually turning steering wheels, etc). While folks who are happier with the product or with tech and latency know that remote driving from 5000+ miles away is not technically feasible.
LeoPanthera 52 days ago [-]
It's pretty weird of you to use this post to attack a specific individual.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
It's not an attack, it's a statement, and he recently had a popular post about this (not linking it here, as he does not take kindly to links from hacker news).
Animats 52 days ago [-]
Waymo seems to be unnecessarily secretive about this. Why not let reporters visit the control centers? Zoox had the New York Times visit one a few years ago. It came out that there are about 1.5 support people per car. Nobody has a steering wheel. They hint to the cars by dropping "breadcrumbs" on screen.
jayd16 52 days ago [-]
Waymo has had blog posts detailing this stuff.
joe_the_user 52 days ago [-]
The ratio of workers to cars matters more, imo, than whether the workers drive the cars. The fundamental sell of self-driving is that it saves labor. If it effectively doesn't, self-driving essentially going to a luxury rather than a replacement for the existing models.
labrador 52 days ago [-]
People who think this is a "gotcha!" for Waymo are either not very well educated, not very smart, or both.
I'm guessing it is for situations like should the Waymo stay in a particular lane or switch lanes, try to overtake another car, etc. That's probably the type of "guidance", which seems a lot like optimization.
ra7 52 days ago [-]
These videos from Waymo shows what kind of guidance they provide:
Notice how the system itself reasons about the scene and asks for help with possible options.
This whole story is a nothingburger. The only “news” here is that the operators are in Philippines.
tehjoker 52 days ago [-]
It's hard to say what this means. They didn't give a single example of the kinds of situations the remote workers help in. I can think of an array of different kinds of situations ranging from "should I continue with this route or turn back" which would be a yes/no dialog box with the car prompting monitoring to real time pedal inputs or emergency stops by people watching the displays constantly.
~~Generally when a company is vague about these things, you should assume there is some very intensive aspect to it undercutting their claims of autonomy or some aspect where people think its dangerous.~~
EDIT: See link below.
Rudybega 52 days ago [-]
I mean, Waymo gives a lot of examples of the situations, in their blog post about Fleet Response where they detail this, released May 21, 2024. They're very explicit that the Waymo Driver autonomous system is in control the entire time.
Thanks for this link. I’ve failed to find specifics on this for a while but this is pretty good, particularly the example about which lane to choose when cones are set up.
tehjoker 52 days ago [-]
Very helpful, thank you.
lateforwork 52 days ago [-]
Unlike Waymo, Tesla robotaxis as controlled by remote workers with steering wheels on their desks, see: https://youtu.be/X8XFsROXifY?t=924
This reminds of Amazon Go "Just Walk Out" technology which turned out to be pretty low tech: remote workers in India watching you through cameras.
rcxdude 52 days ago [-]
The Amazon Go situation was also wildly misrepresented in media, to be clear. It's fairly obvious that they did actually have some vaguely accurate video processing tech, it's just that the reliability never hit a level that the cost of fixing up errors actually saved money vs the alternative.
(The same consideration also applies to Waymo: even if they are not controlling the car like a RC car, does the cost of running their interventions turn the unit economics of their business upside-down? And if not, would this still be true if they were paying US wages for it?)
uyzstvqs 52 days ago [-]
How does one turn "Tesla has computer-connected steering wheels at their office" into "Tesla robotaxis as controlled by remote workers with steering wheels on their desks"?
This reminds me of people saying that ChatGPT was actually just quick typists from India, back in 2022.
The resurgence of this seems to be another addition to the sort of culture war that is going on right now around ai v human labour. I suspect this sort of thing will continue to make hay in the press over the coming year
baxtr 52 days ago [-]
I think it’s funny how this can be framed: Self-driving cars facilitate the offshoring of local jobs.
Geste 52 days ago [-]
The goal of it all is to reduce the costs of labor (you, basically).
On that, AI and robotics are doing just fine !
TurdF3rguson 52 days ago [-]
The labor Waymo reduces is Uber drivers. How is that me basically? I'm not an Uber driver.
almosthere 54 days ago [-]
So,... isn't it illegal to do that. If someone in the Philippines does not have a CA/AZ/Whatever driver's license - then Waymo is breaking the law. It's probably worse than that.
It also proves that Waymo's capabilities are overstated. I keep getting pushback when I complain about specific situations in this forum about how Waymo thinks about complex situations - and this entire time, it may have been humans navigating them.
tredre3 54 days ago [-]
Foreigners can drive in California without a California license. But it's important to note that in this situation they're not driving at all (the latency would make that unfeasible). They're there to disambiguate complicated situations and point the car in the right direction.
Try to not let clickbait headlines shape your view of a situation.
estimator7292 54 days ago [-]
No. In general if you hold a valid license from your officially recognized locality, you can drive in the US.
Did you think we just don't allow foreigners to drive ever?
dcchambers 52 days ago [-]
From a legal standpoint: do these people need valid drivers licenses?
adolph 52 days ago [-]
I think this is a key question. In the May 2024 blog post about "fleet response" it sounds like Waymo has a lawyerly set of rules they follow to distinguish between remote operation and providing guidance to the self-driving system.
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular
situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet
response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment.
The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the
fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.
[...]
Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly
through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a
particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a
path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from
fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
I’d be curious about situations where latency or outages result in deaths of people who have not signed the waymo TOS.
rcxdude 52 days ago [-]
Has Waymo been responsible, in any material way, for any deaths? To my knowledge they have not. (from a quick search: their cars have been involved in one fatal collision total, where a "SUV rear-ends stopped vehicle behind stopped Waymo at high speed, one passenger in the human-driven car and animal declared dead", a situation in which their car was obviously only peripherally involved)
hsbauauvhabzb 52 days ago [-]
I have no idea. I never suggested they have already happened, but I am certain that they will.
spankalee 52 days ago [-]
I'd be curious about situations where human drivers have caused the deaths of people who didn't sign the driver's TOS.
hsbauauvhabzb 52 days ago [-]
That’s individual vs corporate liability, and ‘best efforts’ when things are being outsourced to a different geographic region is riskier than a locally managed decisions team would be an interesting argument.
jedberg 52 days ago [-]
If a person from the Philippines comes to the USA, they are allowed to drive on our roads as long as they have a valid license in the Philippines (no international permit required).
I would assume that would apply here too.
But also, they aren't actually driving the car. They are giving hints to the autonomous driver.
sanex 52 days ago [-]
Don't all companies use remote workers in the Philippines?
ryukoposting 54 days ago [-]
I watched a recording of the hearing. It sounds a lot like the Amazon Fresh thing, at a glance, but it's not.
Amazon admitted that they had a bunch of people in India looking at the camera feeds and validating orders post-facto. The media took this as "the Indian workers are processing your Amazon Fresh purchase, not the computers" which is disingenuous at best. And yeah, it sounds like Waymos usually, nearly always are fully autonomous.
The huge, gargantuan, enormous difference is that, in Waymo's case, the overseas folks are taking control of a fucking car. That's not post-facto like the Amazon thing. And, more importantly, the ramifications of even the tiniest mistake are massive by comparison.
Indian Amazon guy screws up? Shoot, I paid for two heads of lettuce when I only got one. Filipino Waymo guy screws up? Car accident.
By the way: Imagine driving a real, actual car with trans-oceanic ping.
verdverm 54 days ago [-]
> taking control of a fucking car
they aren't though, they are clicking waypoints on a map
ddol 54 days ago [-]
The remote assistance (fleet response) team cannot directly control the car:
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Interesting to watch mainstream media cover something while pretending it is new news. Same thing with various aspects of the Epstein matter.
jrm4 52 days ago [-]
So everyone saying "oh but they told us this" is completely missing the point; it's like those weird logic problems where everyone on the island has a dot on their head or whatever.
There's a massive difference between "widely known" and "widely known that it's widely known."
MaxikCZ 52 days ago [-]
I dont like that story like this gets upvoted to frontpage top 10 when its just a nothing burger :'(
hackeraccount 51 days ago [-]
Honestly AI with remote human assist or remote human with AI assist totally seems like the way to go to me.
I mean they should be doing the same thing for truck drivers, train operators and airlines.
xyst 52 days ago [-]
So "autonomous" vehicles are not actually autonomous. AV companies are so scummy.
52 days ago [-]
semiinfinitely 52 days ago [-]
who cares
riazrizvi 52 days ago [-]
people who are looking for work. you will too one day when you're finally kicked out of the pool, and discover your assumptions about why you had work in the past were wrong.
the problem with ignorance is that those who are ignorant aren't able to appreciate the bliss until after it's gone.
Curiositiy 52 days ago [-]
You would wonder how many US healthcare businesses use customer service reps and other workers in PH.
thegreatpeter 52 days ago [-]
i can't imagine what this thread would look like if it turned out tesla was doing it!
topherPedersen 52 days ago [-]
I don't have any problem with Waymos having a human in the loop for assistance, but sending all of our jobs to other countries is destroying the United States.
lugu 52 days ago [-]
Sorry but Google is a multinational corporation. It makes profites and products everywhere in the world. You should probably open the eyes.
osti 52 days ago [-]
So now you don't want capitalism?
heraldgeezer 52 days ago [-]
Okay, lets do your job and career next! Just capitalism bro.
hackeraccount 51 days ago [-]
There was a debate with Mike Dukakis when one of the moderators asked if he would want the death penalty for someone who killed his wife. He gave some cold blooded answer.
The real answer was probably - I shouldn't be the one who decides what happened to the person who killed my wife.
In the same way - It shouldn't be up to me if I get fired or my job gets shipped overseas or done by an AI. If we're in a free market it's up to all the people who are buying what I'm making. If there's a cheaper way why wouldn't they take it?
52 days ago [-]
heraldgeezer 52 days ago [-]
Downvoted by all the thirdies destroying this site.
jp0d 52 days ago [-]
Shouldn't these workers in Phillipines be required to be licensed to drive cars in the USA to operate those vehicles (even remotely)? I understand that they're not really driving those cars. But they've control over these cars and they do operate them when required on public roads.
jedberg 52 days ago [-]
International drivers are allowed to drive on US roads as long as they have a valid license in their own country. In particular, Filipino drivers are allowed to drive on US roads without any extra paperwork.
But also, even in the USA, we have 51+ different licensing schemes in the US. We already accept that if you have a license in one place, it's good in all the places.
rcxdude 52 days ago [-]
Indeed. I can rent a car and drive in the US, despite having learnt to drive and only having a driving license from a country which drives on the other side of the road.
Ylpertnodi 49 days ago [-]
The correct side, and not the right side.
eek2121 52 days ago [-]
Fun fact, if they are using foreign workers at all, however briefly, they are likely in violation of state law in multiple states.
HOWEVER:
It is entirely possible that some back room deals were made, and possibly laws put on the books in the states they've rolled out in.
I suspect more will come from this, eventually, especially if waymo is involved in accidents that involve insurance claims, injuries, or deaths in one of those states.
danpalmer 52 days ago [-]
IIRC from when Waymo discussed this previously, the remote people don't drive the car, they issue instructions to the autonomous driver. If that's the case they shouldn't need a driving licence.
dekhn 52 days ago [-]
Wouldn't it be risky to do that? This is a multi-billion dollar gamble being executed in front of the public, egregiously breaking the law or making back-room deals both risk extreme negative public reaction if exposed.
We know that eventually a self-driving car will hit somebody and kill them. Waymo and other companies are prepared for that.
rcxdude 52 days ago [-]
what state law would they be violating?
Rendered at 22:19:24 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Surely what matters is the architecture:
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Waymo tell us that fleet response agents can only provide waypoint suggestions, they don't have steer-by-wire remote control of the vehicle.
I think the US should stop being so abusive and mean given how damn rich it is.
Since 1946 the country has simply been known as the Philippines, officially "the Republic of the Philippines" and the ISO 3166 code is PH.
While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.
All self-driving companies maintain teams that make a decision when the cars get confused or stuck, and they report the number of such handoffs to NHTSA.
Is it just that there are teams in the Philippines specifically?
Lazy folks are framing this as "see, it's still humans!", like this awful article by TechSpot headlined "Waymo admits that its autopilot is often just guys from the Philippines": https://www.techspot.com/news/111233-waymo-admits-autopilot-...
1) "Often" is a gross mischaracterization. It's so infrequent you wouldn't believe. Nearly all rides are performed fully autonomously without human intervention. But "often" sure sounds spicy!
2) "its autopilot is just guys from the Philippines": no, it's not. A human is in the loop to help hint to the Waymo Driver AI platform what action to take if its confidence level is too low or it's facing a particularly odd edge case where it needs to be nudged to take an alternate route. This framing makes it sound like some dude in Manilla is remote controlling the car. They're not. They're issuing hints to and confirming choices by the Waymo Driver which remains in full control of the vehicle at all times.
Because lay people, even non-technically-sophisticated lay people naturally start wondering "well, isn't there some delay between a person in the Philippines and the car in the US? how could that be safe? what if the internet dips out or the connection drops?" Which are good and valid points! And why this framing is so obnoxious and lazy. The car is always driving itself.
They finally issued a correction in the linked article that makes it clear they're not remote controlling the cars, but the headline is still really slanted and a frustrating framing. When you ride in these things, you can see just how incredible this technology is and how far we've come.
There are highly talented people in every country. The vast majority of them do not work in call centres.
Forget self driving cars for a minute. If Domino’s wants to deliver a pizza to me, the delivery car driver needs to be licensed (pretty much in that state).
It doesn’t matter even if Domino’s extends some sort of liability insurance. Laws are laws. Legally driver must be licensed. It doesn’t matter if they drive while on a speakerphone call with a licensed driver.
It also wouldn’t matter if the delivery driver had no license but carried a licensed passenger at all times. It wouldn’t matter even if the passenger owned the car.
Having a person drive a car in a country in which they are not licensed to drive seems fundamentally illegal. It’s not a technology issue. It doesn’t matter if there are sensors and satellite links involved. The driver must be licensed.
Somehow society had decided in favor of a little convenience to forget all principles and let tech companies run roughshod over laws, societal norms, and basic human decency.
This is worse than the 1970s mentality of “if it came from the computer it must be correct”. Now it is AI…
I would not personally be comfortable “explicitly proposing a path” for a vehicle operating in the Philippines since I’ve never even been there, let alone driven there. Why would I be comfortable with somebody doing the reverse?
Tourists can drive in the US on their foreign license. Can that be used as a loophole for a call center?
Also, maybe it is a gray area where they are not asking what they don't want to hear. Those offshore subcontractors already break any US law they want because they aren't hiring humans inside the US, they are providing a service from abroad.
Specifically, how do you know the operator can drive?, as you ask. But also, how do you know your operator won't steal your PII / bank account details out of your law enforcement physical jurisdiction?
Because Night shifts are always more expensive. Nothing to do with any A, B or C Team.
Edir: "Markey then asked about where the operators are located, to which Peña says they have "some in the U.S. and some abroad,” however he did not know an exact percentage of those located elsewhere. "
--
Markey: In what countries are these employees located?
Waymo guy: The Philippines.
Markey: Excuse me?
Waymo guy: the Philippines.
Markey: So they are in the Philippines.
----
If they aren't in the Philippines, they need to fire Waymo guy..
(Their societal norms regarding driving habits also aren’t going to be an asset)
What "potentially life-saving situations" are you envisioning?
Here's a Waymo article so you have some idea what we're actually talking about: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Edited: Clarify by removing negation
Edit: "They finally issued a correction in the linked article that makes it clear they're not remote controlling the cars, but the headline is still really slanted and a frustrating framing"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Outsourc...
They got angry about China, the Philippines, India, Kenya.
Oddly, it’s never the people in those countries complaining that they got a better paying job!
Only rich people who think, apparently, that this new middle class ought to be kicked back to the farm fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#In_deve...
The Western companies who employ or contract people in these other countries aren't altruistically investing. They're on the hunt for people who will accept lower wages, and for governments that won't insist on workers rights, health and safety.
So tech companies should be barred from hiring anyone outside the Bay Area? Because hiring someone in Texas or Arizona is necessarily exploitation?
If you were instead hiring from anywhere (because you'd be happy with a remote worker, and they have the same employment rights) and willing to pay the same as you'd pay your Bay Area workers, i.e. it's about the hunt for talented/capable employees whereever they might be, rather than a hunt for cheap ones, that's no longer exploitation.
That's true for a lot of workers in many USA cities as well.
* Interpreting traffic laws
* Managing construction
* Navigating unusual intersections
* Re-routing due to traffic or other unusual conditions
* Safety threshold intervene
Now with driverless all the money leaves the local economy to go to Silicon Valley. And then what human labor is required is then offshored.
Interesting, an immediate downvote asking for sources.
Is there a publicly disclosed number we can use to verify this claim?
It's not unusual and it's quite a routine mode. It will happen if there's a jam in front of you, like a parking lot or narrow passage. Twice, we were behind a marked police car that was sort of double-parked. You'll know Support is imminent when the car is hesitating, and the virtual reality may indicate multiple-choice paths.
It happened to me once today at a "valet parking" stand, in a very busy drop-off circle. (I traveled about 25 miles.) I was also cracking up, because it chose a lot of backroads for the routes, which could've been done on arterials. So I was treated to a real "scenic route" at no extra charge. But Support never called in, and the delay so brief, I am unsure whether their input was necessary to clear the way.
I did once receive a human driver to move the car. The dropoff was in the wrong United States lot, and when I told them I couldn't exit there, they said the battery was so low it needed the American Depot ASAP and wouldn't obey, so an American human was dispatched from The United States of America, and moved it a couple hundred yards... or meters, if you're Pinoy. It was a distinct process for her to climb in and disengage the Waymo Driver, but otherwise just a normal American thing. I mean, she was required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, show her ID to the camera, and finish by singing the Star-Spangled Banner, but otherwise it was normal, and could've happened anywhere. God Bless Waymo.
[1]: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
Ed Markey is going to face a severely harsh primary this election cycle (as are other incumbents in both parties this season).
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/gop-senate-midterms-2026
[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOwRbOK93ag
The way I understood the liability conversation, several years ago, was that each "autonomous vehicle" would have a corresponding operator of record, a licensed driver, who would be the responsible person for the vehicle's behavior. That there would be a designated person to carry insurance and licensing and be personally responsible and personally answer to criminal or civil charges if "their" vehicle got in a fix.
Honestly this model doesn't make any sense, as Waymo has set it up so that the only driver is the Waymo Driver making decisions, because the Waymo Driver is the only one who's privy to 100% the real-time data.
The remote CSRs, whether they're in Philippines or stateside engineers on an escalation, are explicitly not driving the car but giving it suggestions. If they need someone to "drive the car" they literally dispatch a human who gets behind the wheel, and that's how it works.
... >Honestly this model doesn't make any sense, as Waymo has set it up so that the only driver is the Waymo Driver making decisions, because the Waymo Driver is the only one who's privy to 100% the real-time data.
Their competitor Telsa does use teleoperation in their "robotaxis"? So what is ignorant about believing it to be the case in this scenario?
https://electrek.co/2024/11/25/tesla-remote-control-team-rob...
Tesla and Waymo both offer systems to provide sensor insight to remote observers, and the remote observers can send suggestions and nudges to the vehicles. The general public does not understand the nuance here, and they imagine someone is sitting with a steering wheel and pedals, like a radio-controlled toy or a USAF Reaper drone.
> Our remote operators are transported into the device’s world using a state-of-the-art VR rig that allows them to remotely perform complex and intricate tasks. Working with hardware teams, you will drive requirements, make design decisions and implement software integration for this custom teleoperation system.
The article notes that this is very unlike what Waymo is doing:
> This should enable Tesla to launch a service similar to Waymo without having to achieve a “superhuman level of miles between disengagement.”
The general public may not fully understand this nuance. The entire point of autonomous operation is to remove humans from the decision loop and permit the machine to use its own sensors to make rapid decisions in real-time. As autonomy is refined, remote operators will intervene less and less. And as sensors are refined, humans will have less insight than the AI onboard, due to our inability to directly process those signals.
The author does not know "what level" of teleops Tesla wants to implement. But why even attempt to implement FSD or top-level autonomy, if your operators are doing the driving anyway?
This would never scale. We already discussed the incident where Waymo's disengagement overwhelmed their remote techs and it was an undesirable edge-case. In order to operate a robotaxi fleet, the disengages and takeovers need to be safe, legal, and rare.
No, it says it will bring the user into the vehicle. They are driving requirements for building this telepoerating system. The role description couldn't be more clear.
> What company would hire a highly-skilled and credentialed engineer to be a drone pilot?
They're hiring an engineer to build the VR driving system, not to operate it.
> But why even attempt to implement FSD or top-level autonomy, if your operators are doing the driving anyway?
Obviously, they would like to remove the need for the teleoperators, just like Waymo would like to remove the need for its driver assistants, but Tesla is nowhere near being able to do that.
> This would never scale.
You know it. I know it. This is just to fool Cathie Wood into believing that robotaxi works for long enough until they can get Optimus working. Then if they're behind on Optimus, they'll presumably have backup teleoperators for those in small deployments (just like they're doing with robotaxi now) until they can get the next big thing working or until SpaceX buys out Tesla.
(I’m kidding, of course — you’re right that the Actually Indians meme is a gross distortion of reality.)
that's probably fine then
but if they can at all: they need a driving license
it is not unreasonable for a state to want to control who is allowed to move around 1.5 tonnes of metal in a public environment
It is probably true that California has no such law today. It's also true that regulation always takes a while to catch up to technological advances, and so there is a useful, separate conversation to be had about whether California (and anywhere else) ought to have such a law.
Depending on which legislator you listen to, Waymo is either the devil that is constantly running people and cats down everywhere, or savior that will rapidly replace all human drivers because it's safer. At least for now, they are keeping a fairly light touch on the legislation for self-driving cars, both because they want to see the technology expand without unnecessary regulation, and because they want to know what the baseline fatality rate is compared to humans.
Likely when the image is clearer (personally I expect that self-driving will expand to all major US cities, and also demonstrate that it is safer than humans) they will find some regulation around remote operator qualifications.
Especially as the car is already having issues when they takeover.
It's click bait for people's priors
It’s often illegal to make a U-Turn to avoid a police checkpoint for example. There’s no way someone can unstick a confused car without being able to make legally relevant choices.
If a police officer is pointing at your car because they are going to search you no.
You made a series of factually incorrect statements which I have debunked based on trivially determined facts.
For example, I said they operate in Texas as you called out California as your example. Texas doesn’t allow sobriety checkpoints but it’s an entirely new states worth of legal issues here.
well yes, answering matters of law is the exclusive jurisdiction of judges
Same old same old. Some of them actually know stuff. Others are examples of 20th century "Artificial Intelligence." (Got briefed by their staff.)
We assume it’s just occasionally but we don’t actually know that. They could be requesting assistance constantly and Waymo would have an incentive to keep that hush-hush. Certainly would not be the first time a big SV company has faked it until they technically worked.
The way the cars behaved during the power outage could have been the result of anything - even eg. requiring full remote control and losing connectivity to a local facility
Rather than being a bad thing, this is probably Waymo saving his life.
It says the car reduced speed from 17mph to 6mph before contact. This is the kind of reaction-speed safety an AI car should have over a human driver - instead it’s just ‘waymo hit a kid’.
(I try not to pay close attention to lawyer's arguments when they are histrionic)
I'm not saying a human driver would have done better. I'm disputing the claim that a human driver would have necessarily done worse. There is not enough information given to reach either conclusion.
What it actually is, if the car gets stuck someone can manually override - which, I imagine is normal? If the car gets stuck you can call someone and they can do "something", which can probably nudge the car into action. I doubt the latency is that good where someone can remotely drive the car.
Scheduling overheads account for some of the latency.
This is all compounded with anything vaguely legal, at which point decisions are escalated to legal support.
This has led to a drop in legal disputes, keeps legal costs low, and keeps the courts clear.
Surge pricing in SF applies during periods of low agent availability, such as public holidays in the Philippines, or public discontent in other regions of the world.
Sorry about the intersection though.
I always wondered why "Taxi Cab Simulator 7" looked so realistic.
I find this fact to be an interesting litmus test- for example, jwz (who hates self-driving cars, AI, and bigtech) interprets the news to mean the opposite of what I said (it's a bunch of remote workers individually turning steering wheels, etc). While folks who are happier with the product or with tech and latency know that remote driving from 5000+ miles away is not technically feasible.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/waymo-exec-reveals-com...
Text-only, HTTPS optional:
http://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VL9B3/
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VL9B3...
Simple HTML:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=T0WtBFEfAyo
https://youtube.com/watch?v=elpQPbJXpfY
Notice how the system itself reasons about the scene and asks for help with possible options.
This whole story is a nothingburger. The only “news” here is that the operators are in Philippines.
~~Generally when a company is vague about these things, you should assume there is some very intensive aspect to it undercutting their claims of autonomy or some aspect where people think its dangerous.~~
EDIT: See link below.
This isn't something new.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
This reminds of Amazon Go "Just Walk Out" technology which turned out to be pretty low tech: remote workers in India watching you through cameras.
(The same consideration also applies to Waymo: even if they are not controlling the car like a RC car, does the cost of running their interventions turn the unit economics of their business upside-down? And if not, would this still be true if they were paying US wages for it?)
This reminds me of people saying that ChatGPT was actually just quick typists from India, back in 2022.
It also proves that Waymo's capabilities are overstated. I keep getting pushback when I complain about specific situations in this forum about how Waymo thinks about complex situations - and this entire time, it may have been humans navigating them.
Try to not let clickbait headlines shape your view of a situation.
Did you think we just don't allow foreigners to drive ever?
I would assume that would apply here too.
But also, they aren't actually driving the car. They are giving hints to the autonomous driver.
Amazon admitted that they had a bunch of people in India looking at the camera feeds and validating orders post-facto. The media took this as "the Indian workers are processing your Amazon Fresh purchase, not the computers" which is disingenuous at best. And yeah, it sounds like Waymos usually, nearly always are fully autonomous.
The huge, gargantuan, enormous difference is that, in Waymo's case, the overseas folks are taking control of a fucking car. That's not post-facto like the Amazon thing. And, more importantly, the ramifications of even the tiniest mistake are massive by comparison.
Indian Amazon guy screws up? Shoot, I paid for two heads of lettuce when I only got one. Filipino Waymo guy screws up? Car accident.
By the way: Imagine driving a real, actual car with trans-oceanic ping.
they aren't though, they are clicking waypoints on a map
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
There's a massive difference between "widely known" and "widely known that it's widely known."
I mean they should be doing the same thing for truck drivers, train operators and airlines.
the problem with ignorance is that those who are ignorant aren't able to appreciate the bliss until after it's gone.
The real answer was probably - I shouldn't be the one who decides what happened to the person who killed my wife.
In the same way - It shouldn't be up to me if I get fired or my job gets shipped overseas or done by an AI. If we're in a free market it's up to all the people who are buying what I'm making. If there's a cheaper way why wouldn't they take it?
But also, even in the USA, we have 51+ different licensing schemes in the US. We already accept that if you have a license in one place, it's good in all the places.
HOWEVER:
It is entirely possible that some back room deals were made, and possibly laws put on the books in the states they've rolled out in.
I suspect more will come from this, eventually, especially if waymo is involved in accidents that involve insurance claims, injuries, or deaths in one of those states.
We know that eventually a self-driving car will hit somebody and kill them. Waymo and other companies are prepared for that.