[disillusioned]

Well, it's being framed both ways.

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.

[bsimpson]

There's also the implicit xenophobia/offshoring angle that people in a call center in the Philippines must be doing low quality work and/or being exploited.

[tbrownaw]

I think people tend to distrust an assumed lowest bidder regardless of whether they're from here or from over there.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Because outsourced work is often a race to the bottom price wise, resulting in skilled workers finding better higher paying work elsewhere?

There are highly talented people in every country. The vast majority of them do not work in call centres.

[BobbyTables2]

Well they are being exploited for potentially illegal purposes.

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…

[peyton]

Should probably be licensed to drive in the US if “explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider” as Waymo has disclosed…

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?

[legostormtroopr]

Why is it xenophobic to be concerned that non-registered drivers in one country are being allowed to drive remotely in a different country.

[dylan604]

One that I heard a lot is that if you're in the US during the day talking to an offshored tech support person, it's the middle of the night for them. The A-team doesn't work overnight, so you're getting at best second tier. blah blah

[OGEnthusiast]

Why is it xenophobia if it could be true?

[jayd16]

Offshoring our good, American, pretending to be a robot car jobs.

[amiga386]

They are being exploited. They live in a lower cost-of-living country than where their services are rendered, and so neither demand nor receive the same wages as someone in the USA. The contracting company profits - quite intentionally! - from labour arbitrage.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Outsourc...

[nathanaldensr]

They are being exploited. I've traveled to Cebu City where many of these call centers are located. My wife is from the area. To Filipinos, it's a good job, but the quality of life for these workers is still very poor. It's not a living wage; most can't afford to live on their own.

[124816]

It's not lazy framing, this is what "journalism" is now. Push your agenda as far as you can, misrepresenting as many facts as you like. At the very end of your story -- which >85% will never get to -- walk back your misdirections with a paragraph or two of facts, right next to your bolded "sign up" text. None of this is unintentional or accidental.

[mnky9800n]

I think in response to the propaganda and opinion that has been passed as journalism there are very compelling new journalism outlets like bellingcat. So there is hope and probably space for journalism that fills this gap.

[padjo]

If it's so infrequent why do they need to offshore it?

[loeg]

Infrequent things happen all the time at scale?

[fyredge]

A. ML engineers don't want to do it B. Phillipine labellers are way cheaper C. All of the above

[snowwrestler]

Time zone coverage would be an obvious reason to have overseas teams.

[dymk]

Because it's cheaper, duh

[bigwheels]

The fleet of human operators manage many details of Waymo rides.

* Interpreting traffic laws

* Managing construction

* Navigating unusual intersections

* Re-routing due to traffic or other unusual conditions

* Safety threshold intervene

[steveBK123]

Well one concern could be something like - ride share companies already extracted a lot of the profit share of local taxi companies out of their local economies and moved it to Silicon Valley. But at least there were local jobs so a good amount of money stayed in the local economy.

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.

[turtlesdown11]

I assume you have sources for the claims you're making above? Like actual data on the number of people employed doing this work, how often they "guide" the car, etc? Otherwise it's hard to believe your claims.

Interesting, an immediate downvote asking for sources.

[OGEnthusiast]

> It's so infrequent you wouldn't believe

Is there a publicly disclosed number we can use to verify this claim?

[bobsomers]

This is purely anecdotal but I've heard from other riders that the car tells you when it's happening, and it's never happened in my 10+ rides so far.

[pydry]

"So infrequent that we wouldnt believe" and yet in order to save costs they had to use humans from the Phillipines?

[groundtruthdev]

This defense is missing the point. Yes, humans aren’t remote-driving the cars, and yes, most miles are autonomous. But the relevant question isn’t how often a human intervenes — it’s how many humans must be continuously available for the system to function at all. Even if interventions are rare, Waymo still needs operators on shift, fully alert, low-latency, and trained for local conditions, and that cost exists whether they’re doing something or not. Capacity planning is driven by correlated failures, not averages: blackouts, construction, special events, and weather can cause many vehicles to request help at once, and we’ve already seen queues form. That means the human layer is sized for worst-case concurrency, not “99.99% of miles.” So no, it’s not “just guys in the Philippines driving cars,” but it’s also not “so infrequent you wouldn’t believe.” It’s a highly autonomous system with a permanent human ops shadow, and the fact that this work is offshored strongly suggests that shadow is economically material. Miles are autonomous. Ops are not.