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Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#81

Post by soulofmischief »

jdietrich wrote: post #66
olyjohn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that Waymo should just be able to stop the car? It doesn't seem at all ridiculous to you that he is already on the phone with them, and then they just read the script to tell him to pull out his phone and fire up the app? Just what I want is to ride in a car with Comcast level of customer service.

>Could it be that Waymo should just be able to stop the car? That kind of remote control opens up the possibility - maliciously or accidentally, likely or unlikely - for every Waymo in the fleet to abruptly stop, regardless of whether it's safe to do so. That scenario is orders of magnitude worse than "sometimes a Waymo gets lost in a parking lot and it takes a thirty second call to fix it".

You don't think Google is able to stop a Waymo vehicle? They can literally control it remotely. The issue is that the person behind the phone did not have the authorization or access.

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#82

Post by binoct »

jameslars wrote: post #35
binoct wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth making, but there's some serious drama queen vibes that make it feel pretty overblown. If an uber is late to the airport a reasonable person doesn't threaten the driver with covering the cost of their flight.

If an Uber driver caused you to miss a flight by driving around a parking lot in circles at a speed you can't exit the vehicle, you don't think it would be a reasonable request for the customer to ask Uber to make it right?

Fair enough, there is a difference. But now we are not looking at a missed flight so much as attempted kidnapping or imprisonment or some other much more serious crime. Which is interesting to think about with the Waymo example, but hard to take seriously in the context of the video since the rider declines to do what the customer service rep asks them to do (at least appears to for the sake of producing additional outrage for their video)

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#83

Post by Daviey »

jrflowers wrote: post #20
WantonQuantum wrote: post #3

So the guy is in the car and he's concerned about catching his flight but when the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it. Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem?

> Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem? The guy kept filming for under sixteen seconds after asking about and receiving clarification that she is unable to intervene with the car and needs him to use the app. I like the idea that this somehow indicates bad faith or ineptitude in your estimation.

I've also never missed a flight by 16 seconds, so it is interesting that this chap is worried about missing his flight because of a brief delay?

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#84

Post by dns_snek »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #3

So the guy is in the car and he's concerned about catching his flight but when the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it. Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem?

Is "he's just doing it for clout" really passing for a thoughtful response on this topic, on this site?

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#85

Post by jeffrallen »

lyime wrote: post #47
blibble wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these things need to have a giant E-STOP button accessible to the passengers otherwise they should simply be banned

Absolutely not. While that might sound like a safety feature it can also be extremely unsafe. Imagine letting a passenger in a car use the e-brake at any time. It's a tricky problem.

Buses and trains already have publicly usable e-stops. Hell, English ones even have them on the OUTSIDE of the bus.

Clearly autonomous vehicles need e-stops, like all automated machines.

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#86

Post by jeffrallen »

moralestapia wrote: post #40

This is wild! Wow! I used to think highly of Waymo but this could be the worst possible way to handle a situation where a 2-ton object went awry. She should have stopped the car immediately after she became aware of the situation, within the first few seconds of the call. She kept following this dumb scripted conversation as if it was someone calling support because their router won't turn on. What an absolute shit d…

Thank you for calling Waymo, have you tried turning it off and on again?

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#87

Post by happytoexplain »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #3

So the guy is in the car and he's concerned about catching his flight but when the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it. Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem?

Yes, that could be. And you could focus on being annoyed at this guy's social media behavior, if you like. However, it doesn't mitigate, and is less important than, the problem of the car getting into this state and Waymo not having control over it.

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#88

Post by cherry_tree »

soulofmischief wrote: post #81
jdietrich wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Could it be that Waymo should just be able to stop the car? That kind of remote control opens up the possibility - maliciously or accidentally, likely or unlikely - for every Waymo in the fleet to abruptly stop, regardless of whether it's safe to do so. That scenario is orders of magnitude worse than "sometimes a Waymo gets lost in a parking lot and it takes a thirty second call to fix it".

You don't think Google is able to stop a Waymo vehicle? They can literally control it remotely. The issue is that the person behind the phone did not have the authorization or access.

Do you think customer support agents should have that capability?

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#89

Post by soulofmischief »

cherry_tree wrote: post #88
soulofmischief wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think Google is able to stop a Waymo vehicle? They can literally control it remotely. The issue is that the person behind the phone did not have the authorization or access.

Do you think customer support agents should have that capability?

Of course not, but I'm open to the idea that they should be able to escalate to someone who can. This is a transitional period with self-driving cars, and it helps to mitigate serious potential safety issues.

Ideally, in the future you would have to expressly press some button to send an OTP to someone you wanted to allow to control your car, with fine-grained permissions.

Will that future happen? Probably not, and we'll probably see extreme corpgov oversight and mass reduction in individual freedom in return for convenience.

Anyway, I was only responding to OP's claim that support for remote access capabilities could lead to an exploit: There's already remote access capabilities in these cars.

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#90

Post by finnthehuman »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #3

So the guy is in the car and he's concerned about catching his flight but when the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it. Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem?

It's interesting how quickly we've gone from discussing an interesting failure mode of autonomous robots that travel in public spaces, and switched to calling it PEBKAC.

This is a unironically a great signal society is willing to accept self driving cars. Even computer security isn't this good at playing blame the user.

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