alt Hacker News1. Still hard not to think that this is a huge waste of time as opposed to something that's a little more like a public transport train-ish thing, i.e. integrate with established infrastructure.
2. No seriously, is the filipino driver thing confirmed? It really feels like they're trying to bury that.
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I am very pro public transit. But there is still a place for cars (ideally mostly taxis). Going to more rural areas or when you need to carry more stuff. I think an ideal society would have both urban transit, inter-city transit and taxis for the other trips and going out into the country.
As someone who half-learned to drive in Manila, the idea that they would use Filipino drivers as backups is ironic.
For context, my "driver's test" was going to the back of the office, and driving some old car backwards and forwards a few meters.
My view on Waymo and autonomous taxis in general is they will eventually make public transit obsolete. Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient. It will take time to get there though.
But eventually I think we will get there. Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles that are very efficient drivers (we could totally remove stoplights, for example. Only pedestrian crossing signs would be needed. Robo-vehicles could plug into a city-wide network that optimizes the routing of every vehicle.) At that point, public transit becomes subsidized robotaxi rides. Why take a subway when a car can take you door to door with an optimized route?
So in terms of why it isn’t a waste of time, it’s a step along the path towards this vision. We can’t flip a switch and make this tech exist, it will happen in gradual steps.
2. Yes, a Waymo exec described it in a Congressional hearing.
America is not europe, how would public transport work for the last 1/2miles
Filipino driver is false. Filipino guidance person is true.
(2) I really don't understand why people are surprised that Waymo has fallbacks? The fact that they had a team ready to take over as necessary was well known. I've seen a bunch of comments about this and it seems like people are confused.
They are not trying to "bury" remote assistance at all. They wrote a white paper about it in 2020 and a blog post about it in 2024.
Anyway you can think it's a waste but they're wasting their money, not yours. If you want a train in your town, go get one. Waymo has only spent, cumulatively, about 4 months of the budgets of American transit agencies. If you had all that money it wouldn't amount to anything.
"The Filipino driver thing" is simply that there's a manual override ability when this profoundly complex and marvelously novel technology gets trapped in edge cases.
Once it gets unstuck, it runs autonomously.