this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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This would be more impressive if Waymos were fully self-driving. They aren't. They depend on remote "navigators" to make many of their most critical decisions. Those "navigators" may or may not be directly controlling the car, but things do not work without them.
When we have automated cars that do not actually rely on human being we will have something to talk about.
It's also worth noting that the human "navigators" are almost always poorly paid workers in third-world countries. The system will only scale if there are enough desperate poor people. Otherwise it quickly become too expensive.
@Curious_Canid @vegeta this is the case for the Amazon "just walk out" shops as well. Like Waymo they frame it as the humans "just doing the hard part" but who knows what "annotating" means in this context? And notably it's clearly more expensive to run than they thought as they've decided to do Dash Carts instead which looks like it's basically a portable self-service checkout. The customer does the checking. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india
Back when I was a fabricator I made some of the critical components used in Amazon stores. Amazon was incredibly particular about every little detail, even on parts that didn't call for tight tolerancing in any conceivable way. They, on several occasions, sent us one bad set of prints after another. Which we could only discover after completing a run of parts. We're talking 20-30 thousand units that ended up being scrapped because of their shitty prints. Millions of dollars set on fire, basically.
They became such a huge pain in the ass to work with we eliminated every single SKU they ordered from us.
@SippyCup I have never heard a single good thing from anyone who works with or for them.
Where did they say anything about not being able to make the parts to spec?
They were made to spec, but the specs were wrong.
We produced everything to spec and on time, thanks.
Yeah we managed to just put the slave workers behind a further layer of obfuscation. Not just relegated to their own quarters or part of town but to a different city altogether or even continent.
Tech dreams have become about a complete lack of humanity.
I saw an article recently, I should remember where, about how modern "tech" seems to be focused on how to insert a profit-taking element between two existing components of a system that already works just fine without it.
That's called "rent-seeking behavior," and it's not new
Was it The Enshittification?
"Damn, I'm sorry my car killed your kids. The Carscape person didn't get their drop"
Packaging the job as a video game side quest is genius. Make so the gamer has to do several simulated runs before they connect to an actual car, and give in-game expensive consequences for messing it up
I thought the human operators only step in when the emergency button is pressed or when the car gets stuck?
Do they actually get driven by people in normal operation?
The claim is that the remote operators do not actually drive the cars. However, they do routinely "assist" the system, not just step in when there's an emergency.
I think they've got 1 person watching dozens of cars though, it's not 1 per car like if there was human drivers.
What the dumbwaiter hides
Could a navigator run you over twice from different companies after they get fired from the first one?
Sequel to snowcrash right there
God, I hope so.
If they have to do it a second time, they aren't very good at it.
Has anyone found the places where the navigators work to see how it goes? Has a navigator shared their experience on the web somewhere?
I am very curious as to what they are asked to do and for how many cars And for how much money
AI - Actually Indian