Comment by dash2
7 hours ago
People downvoting you may think that this is an uninteresting quibble: we may not find it very surprising that sometimes Waymo asks for human guidance, and we don't necessarily think "autonomous" is an all or nothing designator.
Definition in the Oxford dictionary: "Of, pertaining to, or characterized by autonomy; self-governing, independent; free of external influence or control."
Self-driving car advertisers like Musk or Waymo just want to co-opt this term because it sounds cool. The term also deliberately hides the fact that these vehicles surveil and track you.
EDIT: It is the full definition in the printed Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which is a large two volume publication). It is understandable that morons downvote it.
Most things aren't absolutes. This is no exception. The vehicles can operate on their own the majority of the time. That is a form of autonomy, albeit incomplete.
You are subject to road signs, traffic, police directions, etc while driving. In the event of a natural disaster it seems feasible that you could end up in a situation where you don't know how you ought to proceed. So neither are you "free of external influence or control" in an absolute sense.
A human driver does not have to call a remote operator if the traffic lights are off.
This situation does not require a sophistic argument that we are not autonomous because we rely on the sun. If a child walks alone to school without asking for directions, it walks autonomously. If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous. This is really not that hard.
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In this context, I think I prefer to use this definition from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary: "(of a vehicle) that has the technology to drive itself without a person in control"
I think it fits the state of affairs well-enough.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
That is a sad state of affairs, I hope it does not make it into the printed edition.
The same applies to "autonomous drones", which are the most remote assisted machines imaginable.
But of course the advertising departments want to evoke an image of the Marlboro man saddling his horse rather than a GPS tracked, surveillance riddled, face scanning, remote assisted contraption.