Comment by wigglin
1 day ago
It's not true that waymo is fully autonomous. It's been revealed that they maintain human "fleet response" agents to intervene in their operations. They have not revealed how often these human agents intervene, possibly because it would undermine their branding as fully autonomous.
it is obvious to the user when this happens; the car pauses, the screen shows a message saying it is asking for help. I've seen it happen twice across dozens of rides, and one of those times was because I broke the rules and touched the controls (turned on window wipers when it was raining).
They also report disengagements in California periodically; here's data: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
and an article about it: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2025/02/03/2024-disen...
Rodney brooks would disagree with you: https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-...
> Now self driving cars means that there is no one in the drivers seat, but there may well be, and in all cases so far deployed, humans monitoring those cars from a remote location, and occasionally sending control inputs to the cars. The companies do not advertise this feature out loud too much, but they do acknowledge it, and the reports are that it happens somewhere between every one to two miles traveled
I am not sure what you are arguing against. Neither the author nor I stated or implied that Waymo is fully autonomous. It wasn't even the main point I made.
My point stands: Waymo has been technically successful and commercially viable at least thus far (though long term amortized profitability remains to be seen). To characterize it as a hype or vaporware of AGIers is a tad unfair to Waymo. Your point of high-latency "fleet response" by Waymo only proves my point: it is now technically feasible to remove the immediate-response driver and have the car managed by high-latency remote guidance only occasionally.
Yeah, this is exactly my point. The miles-driven-per-intervention (or whatever you want to call it) has gone way up, but interventions still happen all the time. I don't think anyone expects the number of interventions to drop to zero any time soon, and this certainly doesn't seem to be a barrier to Waymo's expansion.