I had someone remotely intervene on my last ride. A car was trying to parallel park on a narrow street and the waymo stayed put, despite there being plenty of room to go around. I heard a chime and a pop up on the screen said “we’re getting your waymo back on track” and it went around the car, like any sane driver would have done from the get go
That's reassuring to me. I don't know why Waymo doesn't reassure safety conscious people like me by being explicit about this. As it stands, as a computer programmer and professional driver at different times in my career, whose seen a lot of unforeseen bugs and weird driving situations, I'm not putting my life in the hands of this software.
Interesting. This is about a month and half old, so they are getting more transparent. I am not reassured though because based on my reading, it appears the fleet response can't actually take over and drive the car in an emergency. I double checked with Claude AI
Me: "does it appear the remote operator can take over and drive the car if needed."
Claude: "Based on my reading of the document, it does not appear that the remote operator (referred to as "fleet response agent") can take over and drive the car directly"
> I'm not putting my life in the hands of this software.
If you were a professional driver, you know you put your life in the hands of people right? The average person is a pretty terrible driver. I’ll take a safely trained machine all day every day.
The data disagrees with you, significantly. Level 5 technology is only improving, and you’ll regress over time. A waymo never loses focus or gets distracted or tired in the way humans always will.
100,000 miles as a paid professsional driver and a couple 100k more for pleasure and I never once drove into a telephone pole. But keep talking about the mirage Level 5. I can think of many snap decisions I've had to make to prevent death or serious injury, including once when someone tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of me. I seriously doubt AI ability to outperform me in those situations. You're right, humans do regress, that's why I don't drive anymore. But no matter, Waymo's goal is to put millions of American drivers out of a job and they'll do it no matter what I say. Consider me shouting from the void as I disappear along with my working driver brothers and sisters, who Alphabet couldn't care less about.
