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.
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.
* 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?
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
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...
(I’m kidding, of course — you’re right that the Actually Indians meme is a gross distortion of reality.)
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.
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’.
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:
{
x=AA1VL9B3
ipv4=23.11.201.94
echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(printf 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x'/ HTTP/1.0\r\n'
printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \
|nc -vvn $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134'
} > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmhttps://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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.