All self-driving companies maintain teams that make a decision when the cars get confused or stuck, and they report the number of such handoffs to NHTSA.
Is it just that there are teams in the Philippines specifically?
Lazy folks are framing this as "see, it's still humans!", like this awful article by TechSpot headlined "Waymo admits that its autopilot is often just guys from the Philippines": https://www.techspot.com/news/111233-waymo-admits-autopilot-...
1) "Often" is a gross mischaracterization. It's so infrequent you wouldn't believe. Nearly all rides are performed fully autonomously without human intervention. But "often" sure sounds spicy!
2) "its autopilot is just guys from the Philippines": no, it's not. A human is in the loop to help hint to the Waymo Driver AI platform what action to take if its confidence level is too low or it's facing a particularly odd edge case where it needs to be nudged to take an alternate route. This framing makes it sound like some dude in Manilla is remote controlling the car. They're not. They're issuing hints to and confirming choices by the Waymo Driver which remains in full control of the vehicle at all times.
Because lay people, even non-technically-sophisticated lay people naturally start wondering "well, isn't there some delay between a person in the Philippines and the car in the US? how could that be safe? what if the internet dips out or the connection drops?" Which are good and valid points! And why this framing is so obnoxious and lazy. The car is always driving itself.
They finally issued a correction in the linked article that makes it clear they're not remote controlling the cars, but the headline is still really slanted and a frustrating framing. When you ride in these things, you can see just how incredible this technology is and how far we've come.
What "potentially life-saving situations" are you envisioning?
Here's a Waymo article so you have some idea what we're actually talking about: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Edited: Clarify by removing negation
Edit: "They finally issued a correction in the linked article that makes it clear they're not remote controlling the cars, but the headline is still really slanted and a frustrating framing"
I would not personally be comfortable “explicitly proposing a path” for a vehicle operating in the Philippines since I’ve never even been there, let alone driven there. Why would I be comfortable with somebody doing the reverse?
Tourists can drive in the US on their foreign license. Can that be used as a loophole for a call center?
Also, maybe it is a gray area where they are not asking what they don't want to hear. Those offshore subcontractors already break any US law they want because they aren't hiring humans inside the US, they are providing a service from abroad.
Specifically, how do you know the operator can drive?, as you ask. But also, how do you know your operator won't steal your PII / bank account details out of your law enforcement physical jurisdiction?
Because Night shifts are always more expensive. Nothing to do with any A, B or C Team.
Edir: "Markey then asked about where the operators are located, to which Peña says they have "some in the U.S. and some abroad,” however he did not know an exact percentage of those located elsewhere. "
--
Markey: In what countries are these employees located?
Waymo guy: The Philippines.
Markey: Excuse me?
Waymo guy: the Philippines.
Markey: So they are in the Philippines.
----
If they aren't in the Philippines, they need to fire Waymo guy..
(Their societal norms regarding driving habits also aren’t going to be an asset)
There are highly talented people in every country. The vast majority of them do not work in call centres.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Outsourc...
So tech companies should be barred from hiring anyone outside the Bay Area? Because hiring someone in Texas or Arizona is necessarily exploitation?
If you were instead hiring from anywhere (because you'd be happy with a remote worker, and they have the same employment rights) and willing to pay the same as you'd pay your Bay Area workers, i.e. it's about the hunt for talented/capable employees whereever they might be, rather than a hunt for cheap ones, that's no longer exploitation.
They got angry about China, the Philippines, India, Kenya.
Oddly, it’s never the people in those countries complaining that they got a better paying job!
Only rich people who think, apparently, that this new middle class ought to be kicked back to the farm fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#In_deve...
The Western companies who employ or contract people in these other countries aren't altruistically investing. They're on the hunt for people who will accept lower wages, and for governments that won't insist on workers rights, health and safety.
That's true for a lot of workers in many USA cities as well.
Forget self driving cars for a minute. If Domino’s wants to deliver a pizza to me, the delivery car driver needs to be licensed (pretty much in that state).
It doesn’t matter even if Domino’s extends some sort of liability insurance. Laws are laws. Legally driver must be licensed. It doesn’t matter if they drive while on a speakerphone call with a licensed driver.
It also wouldn’t matter if the delivery driver had no license but carried a licensed passenger at all times. It wouldn’t matter even if the passenger owned the car.
Having a person drive a car in a country in which they are not licensed to drive seems fundamentally illegal. It’s not a technology issue. It doesn’t matter if there are sensors and satellite links involved. The driver must be licensed.
Somehow society had decided in favor of a little convenience to forget all principles and let tech companies run roughshod over laws, societal norms, and basic human decency.
This is worse than the 1970s mentality of “if it came from the computer it must be correct”. Now it is AI…
Interesting, an immediate downvote asking for sources.
Is there a publicly disclosed number we can use to verify this claim?
It's not unusual and it's quite a routine mode. It will happen if there's a jam in front of you, like a parking lot or narrow passage. Twice, we were behind a marked police car that was sort of double-parked. You'll know Support is imminent when the car is hesitating, and the virtual reality may indicate multiple-choice paths.
It happened to me once today at a "valet parking" stand, in a very busy drop-off circle. (I traveled about 25 miles.) I was also cracking up, because it chose a lot of backroads for the routes, which could've been done on arterials. So I was treated to a real "scenic route" at no extra charge. But Support never called in, and the delay so brief, I am unsure whether their input was necessary to clear the way.
I did once receive a human driver to move the car. The dropoff was in the wrong United States lot, and when I told them I couldn't exit there, they said the battery was so low it needed the American Depot ASAP and wouldn't obey, so an American human was dispatched from The United States of America, and moved it a couple hundred yards... or meters, if you're Pinoy. It was a distinct process for her to climb in and disengage the Waymo Driver, but otherwise just a normal American thing. I mean, she was required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, show her ID to the camera, and finish by singing the Star-Spangled Banner, but otherwise it was normal, and could've happened anywhere. God Bless Waymo.
* Interpreting traffic laws
* Managing construction
* Navigating unusual intersections
* Re-routing due to traffic or other unusual conditions
* Safety threshold intervene
Now with driverless all the money leaves the local economy to go to Silicon Valley. And then what human labor is required is then offshored.
Ed Markey is going to face a severely harsh primary this election cycle (as are other incumbents in both parties this season).
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/gop-senate-midterms-2026
The way I understood the liability conversation, several years ago, was that each "autonomous vehicle" would have a corresponding operator of record, a licensed driver, who would be the responsible person for the vehicle's behavior. That there would be a designated person to carry insurance and licensing and be personally responsible and personally answer to criminal or civil charges if "their" vehicle got in a fix.
Honestly this model doesn't make any sense, as Waymo has set it up so that the only driver is the Waymo Driver making decisions, because the Waymo Driver is the only one who's privy to 100% the real-time data.
The remote CSRs, whether they're in Philippines or stateside engineers on an escalation, are explicitly not driving the car but giving it suggestions. If they need someone to "drive the car" they literally dispatch a human who gets behind the wheel, and that's how it works.
(I’m kidding, of course — you’re right that the Actually Indians meme is a gross distortion of reality.)
... >Honestly this model doesn't make any sense, as Waymo has set it up so that the only driver is the Waymo Driver making decisions, because the Waymo Driver is the only one who's privy to 100% the real-time data.
Their competitor Telsa does use teleoperation in their "robotaxis"? So what is ignorant about believing it to be the case in this scenario?
https://electrek.co/2024/11/25/tesla-remote-control-team-rob...
Tesla and Waymo both offer systems to provide sensor insight to remote observers, and the remote observers can send suggestions and nudges to the vehicles. The general public does not understand the nuance here, and they imagine someone is sitting with a steering wheel and pedals, like a radio-controlled toy or a USAF Reaper drone.
> Our remote operators are transported into the device’s world using a state-of-the-art VR rig that allows them to remotely perform complex and intricate tasks. Working with hardware teams, you will drive requirements, make design decisions and implement software integration for this custom teleoperation system.
The article notes that this is very unlike what Waymo is doing:
> This should enable Tesla to launch a service similar to Waymo without having to achieve a “superhuman level of miles between disengagement.”
> similar to Waymo
> taking a page out of Waymo’s book
> something that [...] Waymo has already deployed
> one thing that Tesla is taking from Waymo’s approach
> interesting to learn the level of teleoperation Tesla plans to deploy
The general public may not fully understand this nuance. The entire point of autonomous operation is to remove humans from the decision loop and permit the machine to use its own sensors to make rapid decisions in real-time. As autonomy is refined, remote operators will intervene less and less. And as sensors are refined, humans will have less insight than the AI onboard, due to our inability to directly process those signals.
The author does not know "what level" of teleops Tesla wants to implement. But why even attempt to implement FSD or top-level autonomy, if your operators are doing the driving anyway?
This would never scale. We already discussed the incident where Waymo's disengagement overwhelmed their remote techs and it was an undesirable edge-case. In order to operate a robotaxi fleet, the disengages and takeovers need to be safe, legal, and rare.
No, it says it will bring the user into the vehicle. They are driving requirements for building this telepoerating system. The role description couldn't be more clear.
> What company would hire a highly-skilled and credentialed engineer to be a drone pilot?
They're hiring an engineer to build the VR driving system, not to operate it.
> But why even attempt to implement FSD or top-level autonomy, if your operators are doing the driving anyway?
Obviously, they would like to remove the need for the teleoperators, just like Waymo would like to remove the need for its driver assistants, but Tesla is nowhere near being able to do that.
> This would never scale.
You know it. I know it. This is just to fool Cathie Wood into believing that robotaxi works for long enough until they can get Optimus working. Then if they're behind on Optimus, they'll presumably have backup teleoperators for those in small deployments (just like they're doing with robotaxi now) until they can get the next big thing working or until SpaceX buys out Tesla.
Especially as the car is already having issues when they takeover.
It's click bait for people's priors
It’s often illegal to make a U-Turn to avoid a police checkpoint for example. There’s no way someone can unstick a confused car without being able to make legally relevant choices.
If a police officer is pointing at your car because they are going to search you no.
You made a series of factually incorrect statements which I have debunked based on trivially determined facts.
For example, I said they operate in Texas as you called out California as your example. Texas doesn’t allow sobriety checkpoints but it’s an entirely new states worth of legal issues here.
well yes, answering matters of law is the exclusive jurisdiction of judges
that's probably fine then
but if they can at all: they need a driving license
it is not unreasonable for a state to want to control who is allowed to move around 1.5 tonnes of metal in a public environment
It is probably true that California has no such law today. It's also true that regulation always takes a while to catch up to technological advances, and so there is a useful, separate conversation to be had about whether California (and anywhere else) ought to have such a law.
Depending on which legislator you listen to, Waymo is either the devil that is constantly running people and cats down everywhere, or savior that will rapidly replace all human drivers because it's safer. At least for now, they are keeping a fairly light touch on the legislation for self-driving cars, both because they want to see the technology expand without unnecessary regulation, and because they want to know what the baseline fatality rate is compared to humans.
Likely when the image is clearer (personally I expect that self-driving will expand to all major US cities, and also demonstrate that it is safer than humans) they will find some regulation around remote operator qualifications.
Same old same old. Some of them actually know stuff. Others are examples of 20th century "Artificial Intelligence." (Got briefed by their staff.)
We assume it’s just occasionally but we don’t actually know that. They could be requesting assistance constantly and Waymo would have an incentive to keep that hush-hush. Certainly would not be the first time a big SV company has faked it until they technically worked.
The way the cars behaved during the power outage could have been the result of anything - even eg. requiring full remote control and losing connectivity to a local facility