So many of these “revolutionary” automation technologies end up being mechanical Turks. I guess “fake it till you make it” is considered a viable business model in the tech industry.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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It didn't work for Elisabeth Holmes, why does it work for these pricks?
Holmes Cheated Rupert Murdoch, is why she got busted like she did when she did.
They’re men in the privileged pedofile class they can commit as many crimes as they want and nothing will ever happen to them
Hyperloop, Tesla Semi, traffic tunnels, Tesla roadster, Tesla Solar roof tiles....Tesla butler robots...
Worked for the president, musk, et al, everyone is copying them all the way down. If you call them out they will file a 10 billion dollar lawsuit against you and drag you into some court system you don't even live near.
*US tech industry.
It's the ultimate evidence the US has reverted to feudalism when economic power is completely detached from intelligence.
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This article doesn’t really say anything new or alarming. Already knew that remote humans could take control of the vehicle if the AI got stuck. There’s no data here describing how often humans are intervening, so the only thing this is trying to get you angry about is the fact Waymo is using more foreign workers than previously thought.
Mauricio Peña, recently noted that when the company's robotaxis encounter unusual situations, they may switch control to the remote drivers. While some of the contractors work in the US, many operate from other countries, such as the Philippines.
There was a video of it somewhere months ago. They're not taking the wheel; they're just telling the automation to stop what it's doing and give it alternate commands it can actually execute. They showed a gridlock of waymo, they went back to a car that could actually get out of the situation, told it to go park, then told the ones in front of it to back up until the locked car could get out.
Seems like something an autonomous swarm should already be able to do.
Already knew that remote humans could take control of the vehicle if the AI got stuck
i mean, the only thing i'm seeing that seems like i should be argle bargling about is the potential frequency of takeovers and the drivers licensing of the operators. i would want a human taking over from the ML car if it is confused, the ML system i had to work with at my job needed constant handholding.
How dare you disrupt my confirmation bias circlejerk
So do they all have US or international driving licenses?
Better: They have 100 wins in GTA: Online races.
Also, when they make updates to their AI models, does each new model have to pass a driving license test?
define international driving license please. My understanding was: some countries had reciprocity, in that they would recognize each others' licenses for short term stays
I got one of these before that let me drive in another country with my resident country’s driver license, but there was a bit of extra paperwork involved.
ah, this explains my confusion. the reciprocity is already in there:
An IDP is not required if the driver's domestic licence meets the requirements of the 1968 convention; the domestic licence can be used directly in a foreign jurisdiction that is a party to that convention
Executives at way should be personally charged with driving without a license and their business license should be revoked for violating traffic laws. Every day should be a new misdemeanor charge which should bump it up to a felony charge in CA.
If companies want to be treated like persons (thanks SCOTUS!) then after a few tickets every car should lose its license and the whole fleet is grounded.
I never even thought about the fact we have no licensed people driving these cars. How is that legal?
This makes Uber drivers in the US that actually have to get into a car and deal with app and humans and burn gas and oil compete with someone sitting in a chair in the Philippines.
Same with those automated "Amazon go" stores that turned out to just be run by Indians in a data center.
I know nothing about how these vehicles are performing… but I am aware of what driving is like in the Philippines (as a Filipino). You don’t want someone from a foreign country who has never driven where you are physically present to be remotely driving any vehicle due to traffic. I’ve known relatives who taught others to drive that were used to inner city Philippines traffic; you can’t use that experience in a place like the U.S.
EDIT: I just realized I assumed these people are not doing anything technically wrong. My point was that even if you can remotely drive a vehicle well, driving in the Philippines is known for being aggressive and dealing with highly congested traffic.
Hard disagree.
Driving in SE Asia is much more difficult than driving in a western country.
Driving in a US city after navigating traffic in manilla would be a snap. Phillipino drivers are not idiots and can easily recognise that in foreign cities people drive in a different way.
Besides which, I dont think these waymo drivers are driving in that sense. More like "click ok to allow thr vehicle to proceed" kind of way.
Filipino*
I wasn’t saying anyone is an idiot, just that how they drive will be different.
The issue is a South East Asian not used to staying in your lane like US traffic rules, would make a terrible driver in the USA.
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They're not driving whatsoever. They're just giving the autopilot instructions as to how to get unstuck when it encounters a situation it can't deal with. These people are not remotely taking the wheel. The car announces this to the passengers when this happens too. The article title is intentionally misleading.
That more than likely aren't licensed to drive on US roads.
Waymo has been committing thousands of crimes per day.
More rich people benefiting off of borderline slave labor. Shocking.
For those not in the know: this has been a thing for a while, is available to anyone (at least on AWS), and I have very deeply mixed feelings about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon.[1] Employers, known as requesters, post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the requester. To place jobs, requesters use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site.[2] As of April 2019, requesters could register from 49 approved countries.[3] It is named after the Mechanical Turk, a chess machine.[4]
The difference here is that several companies have used offshore human labor for products they claim are powered by AI. Mechanical Turk doesn't claim to be AI.
If a company simply said that their cars are driven remotely by a real person, I think people would be happier with the technology and we'd see such car technology really take-off.
Imagine getting board of driving and paying somebody $20 in another country to drive for a 2 hours for you, while you texted or something
How long before all trucks in the N.America are driven remotely by cheaper labor, that can easily hand off to another driven. The truck would be able to drive virtually endlessly between coasts.
That's not quite how they're doing it, though. That BMW vallet image on the site is misleading. I watched some documentary recently where they talked about this.
They're intervening when the shitty AI can't figure something out, which is a lot. But they're not driving it remotely; the latency would be dangerous. They're telling the automation to back up and go around or to pull up to a certain point.
You still have to pay for all the lidar sensors and computers on the car. You're just paying the cheap labor to change the instructions when the ai can't complete the assignment as it currently estimates it.
You're seriously suggesting that we should trust powered deathtraps running at highway speeds to people who are completely disconnected from the actual risks of driving, and whose connection could suddenly cut out? That sounds like something that Phillip K. Dick would write about, and he would not be kind.
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With this headline it seems as if this may have been their plan all along. Outsource labor to a poorer nation, who work for pennies on the dollar compared to their local counterpart with hopes that eventually they get autonomous driving to a flawless state, and then put both out of a job. Profit!
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“BEEP BEEP MOTHERFUCKER!!”
Dere derecho please! Hayna KO!
Basically third partying cost of labour to a country where worker protections differ (although are there any worker protections in the US at all?).
As expected
Ah not good AI but good AF. Actually Filipino
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