is... AI & automation & robotics all just a plan to get PoC to serve them without having to physically be near PoC
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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Some is that, some genuinely saves labor, some generates CSAM, some inflates stonks. It's a great time to be alive
How is it legal to drive a car with like 150ms of latency minimum? That's impaired driving on a completely different level.
Everything's legal when a corpo does it.
"Your honor, we used a roadside test on his ping. He was legal."
They're not driving.
It's definitely not a 150ms minimum.
Depending on the technology used, latency could reasonably be below 50ms, even as low as about 20ms in the best case.
How would it be anything less then 150ms between LA and the Philippines? 150ms is already assuming pretty much perfect conditions.
Maybe it's just me interpreting 'latency' as being one-way.
That would make sens.e You have to factor in round-trip time because if the car sends video at 75ms to someone, even if they instantly react with zero delay, their reaction now has to travel back the same 60ms of time/distance before the car can act on it.
it's all mechanical turks? 
No, it is advanced, remote and financialized mechanical turks. Soon you will be able to buy mechanical turk futures.
I’m not sure why everyone is acting disingenuously like this is a groundbreaking discovery that Waymos aren’t real and it’s all a mechanical turk. It’s not like the fake Amazon stores. Anyone that’s even mildly familiar with the Waymos knows that humans remote in when the autonomous mode can’t handle it.
Let’s hold ourselves to just a marginally higher standard instead of falling head over heels for fake news maybe?
Yes, I get it, AI and tech bad. But that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying this is genuinely such a weird comment section, everyone is lost in hyperreality.
Yeah I thought it was known (and a good thing!) that when Waymo’s get confused there are remote humans to take over
I don’t think they should exist in the first place but if they’re going to, I definitely want there to be human operators who can cake over if the robot fucks up
I mean.. it's not disingenuous acting - this just isn't a widely known fact? As someone who's researched Waymos specifically, I eventually found out there's some degree of human intervention, but most people won't be in that boat.
Seems like a fun time to share one of my favorite etymolgies
robot(n.)
1923, "mechanical person," also "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical," from the English translation of the 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots") by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,"
Doctor forced worker?? yeah that checks out 
was.... he the good guy all along??
now I want a The Protomen style rock concept album detailing the rise and fall of Robotnik and his travails against that bourgeois hedgehog
Driving a car with a 250ms delay on everything must be fun
still better than somebody texting
Couldn't be me playing a racing sim with an aging computer and shitty internet
Lol every time
E: Also very cool to know that there's no regulation on this or it would have been uncovered way earlier.
San Francisco is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of tech companies. If they wanted to experiment with detonating explosives inside crowded bars the city would find a way to let them do it
Wasn't it a waymo that rolled through a bunch of cops at a traffic stop?
Get the remote operator an Order of Lenin
war on the west via mechanical turk 
Protracted Clanker's War
it says "when waymos are stumped," the robot didn't need a human to tell it the proper course of action
"Oh ya, I got this one. I know what to do here..." 😈
critical support
It's such a ridiculously flawed concept to have remote operators. It seems like a way to make the work look better to "investors".
We already saw Waymos all stopping when the power went out in San Francisco recently (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36zdxl41jro). It has no resiliency in the case of any kind of failure whatsoever.
It's a bad idea to build anything on top of a foundation of things that can be disrupted so quickly. Like power, GPS, cell service and other radio communication. Data centers seem like another big failure point, although I think they still make a lot of sense to have.
But making your service rely on near-real-time internet access to another country is a whole other level of single point of failure. It's hard enough to make a one-way video feed real-time.
This obviously isn't a model for replacing all road vehicles with "driverless" ones. It will never happen. You can't remotely operate a 1 ton metal object moving at 20-80 mph.
We already saw Waymos all stopping when the power went out in San Francisco recently
People act like AI in its current form was inevitable but this reliance on centralized computation centers is one of the ways it was shaped by capital specifically.
It's just another way to outsource work to slave labor in foreign countries. Basically the peak of capitalist innovation.
So it's always "Asian Inside", huh?
what are we...
I remember watching a YouTuber talk about Waymo when it first started, and they had a warehouse in the same city as the cars with people who would remote in if the car got confused. Strangely I haven't been able to find info on this any of the times I've looked despite seeing it with my own eyes - maybe it was a different company idk - but yeah this doesn't surprise me at all.
this is how they all work.. it's for safety reasons
Yeah this isn't new. I don't remember if it was Waymo that was open about it, but there's been a couple of companies that was selling it as a feature. Imo, VR folks remoting in is probably gonna be the future of gig work for a little while.
They will 100% be doing this with the Tesla robots, can't wait to set up my Valve Index again to fold some rich person's laundry.
Lol. Lmao even