It's riding in a robot with no reliable safety fencing. This is the mayhem these companies are subjecting the general public to.
He didn't even miss his flight.
Like 90% of our news. Even the weather is like all drama "atmospheric cyclone tsunami" and ends up as light rain with some flooding, like last year.
And a super typhoon on vacation.
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".
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.
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.
Passenger:1 Google: 0
Let's see how that works out when we're doing 65mph in an autonomous drone car with no steering wheel.
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.
The signal you're seeing is the tendency of tech people to consider any risk to human safety to be less important than the benefits of the technology itself, and to always blame the human and never the tech.
You also see this manifest in any conversation about the failure modes of AI, in the inevitable knee-jerk response of "humans also do x."
Why are you trying to offer an excuse for the inexcusable?
The app should have nothing to do with it. Where are the emergency stop and exit controls for the passenger? He should be able to exit the vehicle at any time.
I fed up with this bad tech and the fact that governments let Big Tech act irresponsibly to get away with this shit. Why aren't there regulations in place before this tech is allowed loose on an unsuspecting public?
If CEOs of tech companies were held directly responsible with the threat of jail time it'd stop almost instantly.
This poor man was forced to slowly circle around a parking lot eight times! It took over five minutes before they fixed the problem! He almost missed his flight! Outrage, outrage.
This is clearly worthy of the electric chair.
The real problem these days is that the culprits who perpetrate this shit are able to hide behind corporate walls—at worst the company gets fined (albeit rarely) but those who are actually responsible escape both freely and anonymously. Laws need to be changed to make employees directly accountable for their actions and to take the consequences.
Unfortunslely, introducing such laws is somewhat complicated and would meet with huge resistance for many reasons too involved to list here. Nevertheless, there's one I should mention, sometimes unavoidable mistakes occur (or important facts remain unknown) even after due diligence and rigorous testing. Laws should not hold individuals responsible for force majeure† (so-called acts of God) that they have no control over. Any change in the law would have to allow for this.
That said, we know damned well that that provision/exception is totally irrelevant in most of these cases/customer unfriendly fuck-ups, clearly they're as guilty as hell.
I'd advocate another change in the law in that shareholders need to be identifiable. We need a way of publicly embarrassing and shaming shareholders when they invest in 'carpetbagger' companies. To avoid shame investors who invested in good faith would be left with little option than to divest themselves of their shares. In effect, shareholders have to share the responsibility for a company's bad behavior and be seen doing so.
Mind you, I can't see this happening anytime soon, as many shareholders are just too greedy to allow laws like this to come into effect. Unfortunately, the political will just isn't there.
_
† A classic example of where hubris, cocksureness, cost cutting and insufficient engineering rigor — AND force majeure led to a disaster was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. If engineering rigor had been followed to the letter and penny-pinching avoided then it's likely the bridge wouldn't have collapsed despite force majeure entering the scene (the physics of Kármán vortex street turbulence was not well understood at the time).