Dr. Missy Cummings joins Harry to unpack remote operations in AVs — from teleoperation vs. assistance and latency risks to Waymo’s model, Cruise’s collapse, and how real safety oversight should look
I feel the latency discussion misses the point that Waymo has about 70 remote assistants per 3000 cars as per the senate hearing. If that's true, they definitely don't have a latency problem with being in the Phillipines. The real latency will be several seconds or even minutes to get a free RA-agent and is not limited to network latency that Dr Cummings seems to be focusing on.
There is no one looking at each car's DDT performance , clearly. If the car is phoning home when stopped the network round-trip latency a non-issue to me.
Personally it feels to me that the way Waymo seemingly has implemented this seems to be both needed and safe. The ADS will never figure out all situations by itself and human input will be needed. I am hoping that most if not all of these are about how to proceed.
It's tough to say whether they have enough RAs or not since I imagine it takes a few seconds for an RA to hop on, assess the situation and then suggest the best course of action.
I think Dr. Cummings brought up a good point though that we just don't know what most of these situations are about as Waymo hasn't been that transparent when it comes to what their RAs actually do/etc. Now if they were doing an amazing job, I'd say leave them alone, but just this past weekend, they got stuck blocking first responders - https://x.com/Breaking911/status/2028160742755537397
I agree that there is a lot of work to be done wrt transparency. Clearly that behavior you linked to (and plenty of others) aren't acceptable performance - but again that has nothing to do with if the RA:s are off-shore or not. It boils down to the Waymo Driver and a quick phone-home and an idle RA.
I feel the latency discussion misses the point that Waymo has about 70 remote assistants per 3000 cars as per the senate hearing. If that's true, they definitely don't have a latency problem with being in the Phillipines. The real latency will be several seconds or even minutes to get a free RA-agent and is not limited to network latency that Dr Cummings seems to be focusing on.
There is no one looking at each car's DDT performance , clearly. If the car is phoning home when stopped the network round-trip latency a non-issue to me.
Personally it feels to me that the way Waymo seemingly has implemented this seems to be both needed and safe. The ADS will never figure out all situations by itself and human input will be needed. I am hoping that most if not all of these are about how to proceed.
It's tough to say whether they have enough RAs or not since I imagine it takes a few seconds for an RA to hop on, assess the situation and then suggest the best course of action.
I think Dr. Cummings brought up a good point though that we just don't know what most of these situations are about as Waymo hasn't been that transparent when it comes to what their RAs actually do/etc. Now if they were doing an amazing job, I'd say leave them alone, but just this past weekend, they got stuck blocking first responders - https://x.com/Breaking911/status/2028160742755537397
I agree that there is a lot of work to be done wrt transparency. Clearly that behavior you linked to (and plenty of others) aren't acceptable performance - but again that has nothing to do with if the RA:s are off-shore or not. It boils down to the Waymo Driver and a quick phone-home and an idle RA.