So many of these “revolutionary” automation technologies end up being mechanical Turks. I guess “fake it till you make it” is considered a viable business model in the tech industry.
Worked for the president, musk, et al, everyone is copying them all the way down. If you call them out they will file a 10 billion dollar lawsuit against you and drag you into some court system you don’t even live near.
It didn’t work for Elisabeth Holmes, why does it work for these pricks?
Holmes Cheated Rupert Murdoch, is why she got busted like she did when she did.
They’re men in the privileged pedofile class they can commit as many crimes as they want and nothing will ever happen to them
Hyperloop, Tesla Semi, traffic tunnels, Tesla roadster, Tesla Solar roof tiles…Tesla butler robots…
*US tech industry.
It’s the ultimate evidence the US has reverted to feudalism when economic power is completely detached from intelligence.
This is just a click bait fear mongering article in the first place. Pre 2025 a Waymo would travel on average 17,000 miles per unusual situation and it would request input for the specific scenario. Even the video in the article doesn’t show someone remotely “driving” the car.
Basically the article could be written as “Waymos have a fallback to request help from a human if they run into an unusual situation.”.
They check the camera footage and give it advice essentially
That more than likely aren’t licensed to drive on US roads.
Waymo has been committing thousands of crimes per day.
More rich people benefiting off of borderline slave labor. Shocking.
So do they all have US or international driving licenses?
Better: They have 100 wins in GTA: Online races.
Also, when they make updates to their AI models, does each new model have to pass a driving license test?
define international driving license please. My understanding was: some countries had reciprocity, in that they would recognize each others’ licenses for short term stays
I got one of these before that let me drive in another country with my resident country’s driver license, but there was a bit of extra paperwork involved.
ah, this explains my confusion. the reciprocity is already in there:
An IDP is not required if the driver’s domestic licence meets the requirements of the 1968 convention; the domestic licence can be used directly in a foreign jurisdiction that is a party to that convention
This article doesn’t really say anything new or alarming. Already knew that remote humans could take control of the vehicle if the AI got stuck. There’s no data here describing how often humans are intervening, so the only thing this is trying to get you angry about is the fact Waymo is using more foreign workers than previously thought.
Mauricio Peña, recently noted that when the company’s robotaxis encounter unusual situations, they may switch control to the remote drivers. While some of the contractors work in the US, many operate from other countries, such as the Philippines.
There was a video of it somewhere months ago. They’re not taking the wheel; they’re just telling the automation to stop what it’s doing and give it alternate commands it can actually execute. They showed a gridlock of waymo, they went back to a car that could actually get out of the situation, told it to go park, then told the ones in front of it to back up until the locked car could get out.
Seems like something an autonomous swarm should already be able to do.
How dare you disrupt my confirmation bias circlejerk
Already knew that remote humans could take control of the vehicle if the AI got stuck
i mean, the only thing i’m seeing that seems like i should be argle bargling about is the potential frequency of takeovers and the drivers licensing of the operators. i would want a human taking over from the ML car if it is confused, the ML system i had to work with at my job needed constant handholding.
Executives at way should be personally charged with driving without a license and their business license should be revoked for violating traffic laws. Every day should be a new misdemeanor charge which should bump it up to a felony charge in CA.
If companies want to be treated like persons (thanks SCOTUS!) then after a few tickets every car should lose its license and the whole fleet is grounded.
I never even thought about the fact we have no licensed people driving these cars. How is that legal?
For those not in the know: this has been a thing for a while, is available to anyone (at least on AWS), and I have very deeply mixed feelings about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located “crowdworkers” to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon.[1] Employers, known as requesters, post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the requester. To place jobs, requesters use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site.[2] As of April 2019, requesters could register from 49 approved countries.[3] It is named after the Mechanical Turk, a chess machine.[4]
The difference here is that several companies have used offshore human labor for products they claim are powered by AI. Mechanical Turk doesn’t claim to be AI.
This makes Uber drivers in the US that actually have to get into a car and deal with app and humans and burn gas and oil compete with someone sitting in a chair in the Philippines.
Same with those automated “Amazon go” stores that turned out to just be run by Indians in a data center.
If a company simply said that their cars are driven remotely by a real person, I think people would be happier with the technology and we’d see such car technology really take-off.
Imagine getting board of driving and paying somebody $20 in another country to drive for a 2 hours for you, while you texted or something
How long before all trucks in the N.America are driven remotely by cheaper labor, that can easily hand off to another driven. The truck would be able to drive virtually endlessly between coasts.
That’s not quite how they’re doing it, though. That BMW vallet image on the site is misleading. I watched some documentary recently where they talked about this.
They’re intervening when the shitty AI can’t figure something out, which is a lot. But they’re not driving it remotely; the latency would be dangerous. They’re telling the automation to back up and go around or to pull up to a certain point.
You still have to pay for all the lidar sensors and computers on the car. You’re just paying the cheap labor to change the instructions when the ai can’t complete the assignment as it currently estimates it.
You’re seriously suggesting that we should trust powered deathtraps running at highway speeds to people who are completely disconnected from the actual risks of driving, and whose connection could suddenly cut out? That sounds like something that Phillip K. Dick would write about, and he would not be kind.
Lot’s of people can’t be truck drivers because they can’t be away from their families; having young children, elderly parents. We can transform this into a work-from-home job.
With this headline it seems as if this may have been their plan all along. Outsource labor to a poorer nation, who work for pennies on the dollar compared to their local counterpart with hopes that eventually they get autonomous driving to a flawless state, and then put both out of a job. Profit!
I think that there would be a fortune to make if a company just says they are paying workers to remotely drive cars. They’d be able to get proper regulations in place, and then also take over the entire trucking market. It would still probably cost less than trying to develop the AI.
I know nothing about how these vehicles are performing… but I am aware of what driving is like in the Philippines (as a Filipino). You don’t want someone from a foreign country who has never driven where you are physically present to be remotely driving any vehicle due to traffic. I’ve known relatives who taught others to drive that were used to inner city Philippines traffic; you can’t use that experience in a place like the U.S.
EDIT: I just realized I assumed these people are not doing anything technically wrong. My point was that even if you can remotely drive a vehicle well, driving in the Philippines is known for being aggressive and dealing with highly congested traffic.
They’re not driving whatsoever. They’re just giving the autopilot instructions as to how to get unstuck when it encounters a situation it can’t deal with. These people are not remotely taking the wheel. The car announces this to the passengers when this happens too. The article title is intentionally misleading.
Hard disagree.
Driving in SE Asia is much more difficult than driving in a western country.
Driving in a US city after navigating traffic in manilla would be a snap. Phillipino drivers are not idiots and can easily recognise that in foreign cities people drive in a different way.
Besides which, I dont think these waymo drivers are driving in that sense. More like “click ok to allow thr vehicle to proceed” kind of way.
Filipino*
I wasn’t saying anyone is an idiot, just that how they drive will be different.
The issue is a South East Asian not used to staying in your lane like US traffic rules, would make a terrible driver in the USA.
Nonsense.
Many millions of people who learned to drive in SE Asia have relocated to Western Countries and manage to understand staying in their lane just fine.
It’s not as though drivers from SE Asia have any less situational awareness, merely that driving etiquette is different.
These are remote drivers though, who don’t have legal license for the west. And my Indian coworkers who moved here, said it was an adjustment in patience and let the laneswitch, and dart out habits die.
Although my one coworker I still don’t like driving with, as it’s a hold the roof handle type ride.
driving etiquette is different.
I figured this would be the key issue. Even in the US, people drive very differently in different states. I lived in south Florida for a while and although I could go on about drivers there, what really makes it tricky is the design of the roads/lights. There are some on-ramps where you’d have to cross a solid line in order to get onto the main highway (and if you don’t, you head straight into an off-ramp.) This is a distinct problem around Miami on I-95. There are also left-turn lights that don’t activate at all during rush hour (despite having left-turn lanes.) This also occurs in Miami, specifically on US-1.
Both of these situations mean having to technically make illegal moves in order to get where you need to go, by either crossing a solid line or turning left on red, respectively. It’s absolutely maddening, and makes being a law-abiding driver effectively impossible.
I don’t envy anyone trying to drive in roads like that, let alone people used to driving laws in another country who may be unfamiliar with how to safely navigate such situations.
So my wife does most of our driving. She’s a better driver. We both grew up near San Francisco. When we’re in Texas I drive just because I’m familiar with the road layouts and the road etiquette (I’ve lived there, she hasn’t). Even navigating I can’t point stuff out fast enough. After being there a few weeks for a major conference, she finally caught on that my backseat driving was trying to get her to follow the local etiquette and get her around traffic (or more accurately, stop hanging out in the left lane and let people pass oh my gods) and suddenly we were moving faster.
I can’t imagine working for waymo and jumping from san francisco to austin to orlando to DC to podunk to manila to paris and trying to keep all the different locales’ driving etiquettes in my head so i was not just driving legally but safely. i mean i’m good but i’m not that good.
Hush! Don’t confuse the issue with facts when someone is going full-tilt racist!
I know right?
Asian people couldn’t possibly learn how to drive like an American, its far too civilised /s
It is actually easier to do lane driving than not to.
I am a cyclist and it was much easier to drive in the capital, where people would lane drive (and ride in the lane myself) despite overall faster traffic, as compared to other cities, where everyone is just haphazard, with regular wrong-siders making the slow lanes harder.Yeah. I’m Australian but have lived in SE Asia for several years.
Driving in Australia is infinitely easier than Asia. Its easy to make the adjustment to driving in Australia but most Australian drivers would struggle Driving in Adia.
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Someone else pointed this out some 10 hours ago. Well done.
Basically third partying cost of labour to a country where worker protections differ (although are there any worker protections in the US at all?).
“BEEP BEEP MOTHERFUCKER!!”
Dere derecho please! Hayna KO!
As expected
Ah not good AI but good AF. Actually Filipino
