Waymo exec reveals company uses remote workers in the Philippines

Er, this was reported by waymo themselves nearly two years ago: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response

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?

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’.

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.

Filipino here..

I always wondered why "Taxi Cab Simulator 7" looked so realistic.

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.

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.

People who think this is a "gotcha!" for Waymo are either not very well educated, not very smart, or both.

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.

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.

Old news, I wrote about this almost 2 years ago: https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/is-teleoperated-driving-pavi...

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

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.

You would wonder how many US healthcare businesses use customer service reps and other workers in PH.

I think it’s funny how this can be framed: Self-driving cars facilitate the offshoring of local jobs.

Don't all companies use remote workers in the Philippines?

From a legal standpoint: do these people need valid drivers licenses?

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.

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."

I dont like that story like this gets upvoted to frontpage top 10 when its just a nothing burger :'(

who cares

Interesting to watch mainstream media cover something while pretending it is new news. Same thing with various aspects of the Epstein matter.

So "autonomous" vehicles are not actually autonomous. AV companies are so scummy.

i can't imagine what this thread would look like if it turned out tesla was doing it!

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.

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.