A Lot Of The Reactions To Waymo AVs Using Human Intervention When Needed Feels Needlessly Alarmist

Automated Vehicles (AV) are getting a lot of attention at the moment, specifically Waymo’s robotaxis. This stems primarily from a congressional hearing that took place on Wednesday about the future of self-driving cars in America, as well as scrutiny of robotaxi safety after a Waymo robotaxi hit a child in Santa Monica, California. Luckily, the kid was okay, and there’s an NHTSA investigation looking into the incident, which is good. We should be scrutinizing all incidents with AVs, we should be studying how they work in our greater, largely human-driven environment, and we should give real thought not just to how these companies are operating and managing these cars, but how we want them to be operated and managed. What certainly doesn’t help any of this, though, is alarmism, both relating to the role of the human operators and where they’re located.

It was during these hearings that the fact that Waymo robotaxis will sometimes reach out to human “fleet response” operators was first revealed, dramatically, by Waymo’s chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, probably sweating lavishly as he was grilled by senators like Ed Markey (D-MA). Well, I mean, “revealed” and “dramatically” are only true if you, say, ignore the fact that Waymo has never kept the fact that they use remote human input to assist their robotaxis when needed, as they describe in some detail in this post from May 2024.

Media outlets have been treating this operational fact as some kind of wild gotcha, as you can see in headlines from a Google search:

While some of these headlines describe what the remote operators do as “assist,” which is really a more accurate way to describe what’s happening, some really went for it and cast the situations as people from an island nation outside of America’s direct influence are “controlling” 4,000-pound driving robots in our cities. The website Futurism had what may be the most alarming headline, which they changed about three or four hours after the story went up:

Let’s just be clear about what’s going on here: humans, no matter where they are, are not driving Waymo robotaxis. I spoke with Ethan Teicher at Waymo to confirm all this, and from what I was told – and what is described in Waymo’s 2024 post on the subject – the Waymo Driver (that’s what they call the combination of hardware and software that actually drives the car) – is always in charge of the actual driving of the vehicle, for better or for worse.

From that post:

“In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. 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.”

No one is driving these cars remotely; in situations where the Waymo is confused, it may call for assistance and get guidance from fleet response. This seems pretty clear when you think about some of the dumb and obvious mistakes Waymo robotaxis have made over the years, like when, this past October, a Waymo robotaxi seemed to be absolutely baffled by one of the most obvious vehicles on the road, a schoolbus. If a human were driving, no matter where they were, they would not have made as many misguided driving decisions as the Waymo Driver did.

And yet, despite the fact that Waymo using remote people to assist the cars was no secret, we still get videos with titles that start with “SHOCKING REVELATION“:

Here’s the thing, though – why is any of this “shocking?” It’s a good thing that these cars reach out to humans to get input about complex or confusing driving situations. Why wouldn’t you want a robotaxi to be able to escalate a situation to get input from someone who understands how the world works? This should be – and probably is – a default expectation for any organization looking to field automated vehicles into public areas.

Now, the part about these remote operators being staged in places like the Philippines may be a bit more complex, but I also feel like there’s a lot of alarmism going on there, too. Let’s be honest: we know fundamentally why Waymo has these centers in the Philippines. It’s cheaper! I mean, come on, that’s not really hard to figure out. It’s not like Waymo was looking for the country with the world’s finest drivers; if that were the case, all these centers would be based in Finland.

And, yes, sure, Waymo is expanding globally and will be launching robotaxi service in Tokyo and London soon, so having multiple locations for their fleet operators makes sense from that perspective, too.

But if you watch that video clip, the Senator is suggesting that these remote operators being outside of America is a security risk, and I think that’s a bit misguided. They’re remote; even if they were located in Kansas, if a malicious entity wanted to hack that line of communication between a fleet operator and the robotaxi, they could do that regardless of where they are. Cybersecurity issues aren’t constrained by geography.

Now, the point about jobs being shipped overseas, I think, is more valid; it used to be that local taxi service jobs simply couldn’t be outsourced to another country, and now they sort of can be. That’s not great! AI takes away enough jobs as it is, so perhaps some restrictions on robotaxi companies moving all the jobs to countries where they can pay people less should be imposed. But that’s not the same thing as the implication that non-US-based fleet operators are a huge security risk.

If you’re worried about humans influencing Waymos to do bad things, it should be reassuring that the Waymo Driver system is always in full control. As Waymo’s statement notes:

It is very important to note, however, their role is never to drive the vehicle remotely. Our technology, the Waymo Driver, is in control of the dynamic driving task, even when it is receiving guidance from remote assistance. Fleet response agents can provide additional context requested by the Waymo Driver (often in the form of multiple choice questions). The Waymo Driver can then appropriately accept or reject Fleet Response agents’ suggestions.

Now, if your concerns are with the decisions that Waymo Driver makes, maybe this is bad news. But if you’re worried about someone getting a job at a Philippine-based Waymo fleet operations center to try and guide a Waymo to, say, drive into the big creepy clown on the Circus Liquor sign in North Hollywood, I don’t really think that’s a valid concern.

There are still plenty of big, important issues yet to be solved with AVs, whether they’re robotaxis or automated delivery vehicles or whatever. We’re only at the very beginning of this journey, and it’ll go a lot easier if we can keep focus on the real problems and not get sucked into distracting alarmism.

Top graphic images: Waymo; Amazon; Futurism