Waymo exec reveals company uses remote workers in the Philippines
people.com
people.com
While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.
Surely what matters is the architecture:
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Waymo tell us that fleet response agents can only provide waypoint suggestions, they don't have steer-by-wire remote control of the vehicle.
Since 1946 the country has simply been known as the Philippines, officially "the Republic of the Philippines" and the ISO 3166 code is PH.
I think the US should stop being so abusive and mean given how damn rich it is.
All self-driving companies maintain teams that make a decision when the cars get confused or stuck, and they report the number of such handoffs to NHTSA.
Is it just that there are teams in the Philippines specifically?
Ed Markey is going to face a severely harsh primary this election cycle (as are other incumbents in both parties this season).
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/gop-senate-midterms-2026
Same old same old. Some of them actually know stuff. Others are examples of 20th century "Artificial Intelligence." (Got briefed by their staff.)
Especially as the car is already having issues when they takeover.
It's click bait for people's priors
It’s often illegal to make a U-Turn to avoid a police checkpoint for example. There’s no way someone can unstick a confused car without being able to make legally relevant choices.
If a police officer is pointing at your car because they are going to search you no.
You made a series of factually incorrect statements which I have debunked based on trivially determined facts.
For example, I said they operate in Texas as you called out California as your example. Texas doesn’t allow sobriety checkpoints but it’s an entirely new states worth of legal issues here.
well yes, answering matters of law is the exclusive jurisdiction of judges
that's probably fine then
but if they can at all: they need a driving license
it is not unreasonable for a state to want to control who is allowed to move around 1.5 tonnes of metal in a public environment
It is probably true that California has no such law today. It's also true that regulation always takes a while to catch up to technological advances, and so there is a useful, separate conversation to be had about whether California (and anywhere else) ought to have such a law.
Depending on which legislator you listen to, Waymo is either the devil that is constantly running people and cats down everywhere, or savior that will rapidly replace all human drivers because it's safer. At least for now, they are keeping a fairly light touch on the legislation for self-driving cars, both because they want to see the technology expand without unnecessary regulation, and because they want to know what the baseline fatality rate is compared to humans.
Likely when the image is clearer (personally I expect that self-driving will expand to all major US cities, and also demonstrate that it is safer than humans) they will find some regulation around remote operator qualifications.
The way I understood the liability conversation, several years ago, was that each "autonomous vehicle" would have a corresponding operator of record, a licensed driver, who would be the responsible person for the vehicle's behavior. That there would be a designated person to carry insurance and licensing and be personally responsible and personally answer to criminal or civil charges if "their" vehicle got in a fix.
Honestly this model doesn't make any sense, as Waymo has set it up so that the only driver is the Waymo Driver making decisions, because the Waymo Driver is the only one who's privy to 100% the real-time data.
The remote CSRs, whether they're in Philippines or stateside engineers on an escalation, are explicitly not driving the car but giving it suggestions. If they need someone to "drive the car" they literally dispatch a human who gets behind the wheel, and that's how it works.
(I’m kidding, of course — you’re right that the Actually Indians meme is a gross distortion of reality.)
... >Honestly this model doesn't make any sense, as Waymo has set it up so that the only driver is the Waymo Driver making decisions, because the Waymo Driver is the only one who's privy to 100% the real-time data.
Their competitor Telsa does use teleoperation in their "robotaxis"? So what is ignorant about believing it to be the case in this scenario?
https://electrek.co/2024/11/25/tesla-remote-control-team-rob...
Tesla and Waymo both offer systems to provide sensor insight to remote observers, and the remote observers can send suggestions and nudges to the vehicles. The general public does not understand the nuance here, and they imagine someone is sitting with a steering wheel and pedals, like a radio-controlled toy or a USAF Reaper drone.
> Our remote operators are transported into the device’s world using a state-of-the-art VR rig that allows them to remotely perform complex and intricate tasks. Working with hardware teams, you will drive requirements, make design decisions and implement software integration for this custom teleoperation system.
The article notes that this is very unlike what Waymo is doing:
> This should enable Tesla to launch a service similar to Waymo without having to achieve a “superhuman level of miles between disengagement.”
> similar to Waymo
> taking a page out of Waymo’s book
> something that [...] Waymo has already deployed
> one thing that Tesla is taking from Waymo’s approach
> interesting to learn the level of teleoperation Tesla plans to deploy
The general public may not fully understand this nuance. The entire point of autonomous operation is to remove humans from the decision loop and permit the machine to use its own sensors to make rapid decisions in real-time. As autonomy is refined, remote operators will intervene less and less. And as sensors are refined, humans will have less insight than the AI onboard, due to our inability to directly process those signals.
The author does not know "what level" of teleops Tesla wants to implement. But why even attempt to implement FSD or top-level autonomy, if your operators are doing the driving anyway?
This would never scale. We already discussed the incident where Waymo's disengagement overwhelmed their remote techs and it was an undesirable edge-case. In order to operate a robotaxi fleet, the disengages and takeovers need to be safe, legal, and rare.
No, it says it will bring the user into the vehicle. They are driving requirements for building this telepoerating system. The role description couldn't be more clear.
> What company would hire a highly-skilled and credentialed engineer to be a drone pilot?
They're hiring an engineer to build the VR driving system, not to operate it.
> But why even attempt to implement FSD or top-level autonomy, if your operators are doing the driving anyway?
Obviously, they would like to remove the need for the teleoperators, just like Waymo would like to remove the need for its driver assistants, but Tesla is nowhere near being able to do that.
> This would never scale.
You know it. I know it. This is just to fool Cathie Wood into believing that robotaxi works for long enough until they can get Optimus working. Then if they're behind on Optimus, they'll presumably have backup teleoperators for those in small deployments (just like they're doing with robotaxi now) until they can get the next big thing working or until SpaceX buys out Tesla.
Lazy folks are framing this as "see, it's still humans!", like this awful article by TechSpot headlined "Waymo admits that its autopilot is often just guys from the Philippines": https://www.techspot.com/news/111233-waymo-admits-autopilot-...
1) "Often" is a gross mischaracterization. It's so infrequent you wouldn't believe. Nearly all rides are performed fully autonomously without human intervention. But "often" sure sounds spicy!
2) "its autopilot is just guys from the Philippines": no, it's not. A human is in the loop to help hint to the Waymo Driver AI platform what action to take if its confidence level is too low or it's facing a particularly odd edge case where it needs to be nudged to take an alternate route. This framing makes it sound like some dude in Manilla is remote controlling the car. They're not. They're issuing hints to and confirming choices by the Waymo Driver which remains in full control of the vehicle at all times.
Because lay people, even non-technically-sophisticated lay people naturally start wondering "well, isn't there some delay between a person in the Philippines and the car in the US? how could that be safe? what if the internet dips out or the connection drops?" Which are good and valid points! And why this framing is so obnoxious and lazy. The car is always driving itself.
They finally issued a correction in the linked article that makes it clear they're not remote controlling the cars, but the headline is still really slanted and a frustrating framing. When you ride in these things, you can see just how incredible this technology is and how far we've come.
What "potentially life-saving situations" are you envisioning?
Here's a Waymo article so you have some idea what we're actually talking about: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Edited: Clarify by removing negation
Edit: "They finally issued a correction in the linked article that makes it clear they're not remote controlling the cars, but the headline is still really slanted and a frustrating framing"
I would not personally be comfortable “explicitly proposing a path” for a vehicle operating in the Philippines since I’ve never even been there, let alone driven there. Why would I be comfortable with somebody doing the reverse?
Tourists can drive in the US on their foreign license. Can that be used as a loophole for a call center?
Also, maybe it is a gray area where they are not asking what they don't want to hear. Those offshore subcontractors already break any US law they want because they aren't hiring humans inside the US, they are providing a service from abroad.
Specifically, how do you know the operator can drive?, as you ask. But also, how do you know your operator won't steal your PII / bank account details out of your law enforcement physical jurisdiction?
Because Night shifts are always more expensive. Nothing to do with any A, B or C Team.
Edir: "Markey then asked about where the operators are located, to which Peña says they have "some in the U.S. and some abroad,” however he did not know an exact percentage of those located elsewhere. "
--
Markey: In what countries are these employees located?
Waymo guy: The Philippines.
Markey: Excuse me?
Waymo guy: the Philippines.
Markey: So they are in the Philippines.
----
If they aren't in the Philippines, they need to fire Waymo guy..
(Their societal norms regarding driving habits also aren’t going to be an asset)
There are highly talented people in every country. The vast majority of them do not work in call centres.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Outsourc...
So tech companies should be barred from hiring anyone outside the Bay Area? Because hiring someone in Texas or Arizona is necessarily exploitation?
If you were instead hiring from anywhere (because you'd be happy with a remote worker, and they have the same employment rights) and willing to pay the same as you'd pay your Bay Area workers, i.e. it's about the hunt for talented/capable employees whereever they might be, rather than a hunt for cheap ones, that's no longer exploitation.
They got angry about China, the Philippines, India, Kenya.
Oddly, it’s never the people in those countries complaining that they got a better paying job!
Only rich people who think, apparently, that this new middle class ought to be kicked back to the farm fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#In_deve...
The Western companies who employ or contract people in these other countries aren't altruistically investing. They're on the hunt for people who will accept lower wages, and for governments that won't insist on workers rights, health and safety.
That's true for a lot of workers in many USA cities as well.
Forget self driving cars for a minute. If Domino’s wants to deliver a pizza to me, the delivery car driver needs to be licensed (pretty much in that state).
It doesn’t matter even if Domino’s extends some sort of liability insurance. Laws are laws. Legally driver must be licensed. It doesn’t matter if they drive while on a speakerphone call with a licensed driver.
It also wouldn’t matter if the delivery driver had no license but carried a licensed passenger at all times. It wouldn’t matter even if the passenger owned the car.
Having a person drive a car in a country in which they are not licensed to drive seems fundamentally illegal. It’s not a technology issue. It doesn’t matter if there are sensors and satellite links involved. The driver must be licensed.
Somehow society had decided in favor of a little convenience to forget all principles and let tech companies run roughshod over laws, societal norms, and basic human decency.
This is worse than the 1970s mentality of “if it came from the computer it must be correct”. Now it is AI…
Interesting, an immediate downvote asking for sources.
Is there a publicly disclosed number we can use to verify this claim?
It's not unusual and it's quite a routine mode. It will happen if there's a jam in front of you, like a parking lot or narrow passage. Twice, we were behind a marked police car that was sort of double-parked. You'll know Support is imminent when the car is hesitating, and the virtual reality may indicate multiple-choice paths.
It happened to me once today at a "valet parking" stand, in a very busy drop-off circle. (I traveled about 25 miles.) I was also cracking up, because it chose a lot of backroads for the routes, which could've been done on arterials. So I was treated to a real "scenic route" at no extra charge. But Support never called in, and the delay so brief, I am unsure whether their input was necessary to clear the way.
I did once receive a human driver to move the car. The dropoff was in the wrong United States lot, and when I told them I couldn't exit there, they said the battery was so low it needed the American Depot ASAP and wouldn't obey, so an American human was dispatched from The United States of America, and moved it a couple hundred yards... or meters, if you're Pinoy. It was a distinct process for her to climb in and disengage the Waymo Driver, but otherwise just a normal American thing. I mean, she was required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, show her ID to the camera, and finish by singing the Star-Spangled Banner, but otherwise it was normal, and could've happened anywhere. God Bless Waymo.
* Interpreting traffic laws
* Managing construction
* Navigating unusual intersections
* Re-routing due to traffic or other unusual conditions
* Safety threshold intervene
Now with driverless all the money leaves the local economy to go to Silicon Valley. And then what human labor is required is then offshored.
We assume it’s just occasionally but we don’t actually know that. They could be requesting assistance constantly and Waymo would have an incentive to keep that hush-hush. Certainly would not be the first time a big SV company has faked it until they technically worked.
The way the cars behaved during the power outage could have been the result of anything - even eg. requiring full remote control and losing connectivity to a local facility
Rather than being a bad thing, this is probably Waymo saving his life.
It says the car reduced speed from 17mph to 6mph before contact. This is the kind of reaction-speed safety an AI car should have over a human driver - instead it’s just ‘waymo hit a kid’.
After passing the Genesee exit, Aguilera Mederos's truck began to smoke as he passed a runaway truck ramp, without taking it, and instead drifted into the left lane nearly clipping a white Chevy Silverado, and passed the next exit as well. For the next few minutes, Aguilera Mederos reached speeds upwards of 100 miles per hour (161 km/h)[6] and passed the next four exits.
(I try not to pay close attention to lawyer's arguments when they are histrionic)
I'm not saying a human driver would have done better. I'm disputing the claim that a human driver would have necessarily done worse. There is not enough information given to reach either conclusion.
What it actually is, if the car gets stuck someone can manually override - which, I imagine is normal? If the car gets stuck you can call someone and they can do "something", which can probably nudge the car into action. I doubt the latency is that good where someone can remotely drive the car.
Scheduling overheads account for some of the latency.
This is all compounded with anything vaguely legal, at which point decisions are escalated to legal support.
This has led to a drop in legal disputes, keeps legal costs low, and keeps the courts clear.
Surge pricing in SF applies during periods of low agent availability, such as public holidays in the Philippines, or public discontent in other regions of the world.
Sorry about the intersection though.
I always wondered why "Taxi Cab Simulator 7" looked so realistic.
I find this fact to be an interesting litmus test- for example, jwz (who hates self-driving cars, AI, and bigtech) interprets the news to mean the opposite of what I said (it's a bunch of remote workers individually turning steering wheels, etc). While folks who are happier with the product or with tech and latency know that remote driving from 5000+ miles away is not technically feasible.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/waymo-exec-reveals-com...
Text-only, HTTPS optional:
http://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VL9B3/
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VL9B3...
Simple HTML:
{
x=AA1VL9B3
ipv4=23.11.201.94
echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(printf 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x'/ HTTP/1.0\r\n'
printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \
|nc -vvn $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134'
} > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmhttps://youtube.com/watch?v=T0WtBFEfAyo
https://youtube.com/watch?v=elpQPbJXpfY
Notice how the system itself reasons about the scene and asks for help with possible options.
This whole story is a nothingburger. The only “news” here is that the operators are in Philippines.
~~Generally when a company is vague about these things, you should assume there is some very intensive aspect to it undercutting their claims of autonomy or some aspect where people think its dangerous.~~
EDIT: See link below.
This isn't something new.
This reminds of Amazon Go "Just Walk Out" technology which turned out to be pretty low tech: remote workers in India watching you through cameras.
(The same consideration also applies to Waymo: even if they are not controlling the car like a RC car, does the cost of running their interventions turn the unit economics of their business upside-down? And if not, would this still be true if they were paying US wages for it?)
This reminds me of people saying that ChatGPT was actually just quick typists from India, back in 2022.
It also proves that Waymo's capabilities are overstated. I keep getting pushback when I complain about specific situations in this forum about how Waymo thinks about complex situations - and this entire time, it may have been humans navigating them.
Try to not let clickbait headlines shape your view of a situation.
Did you think we just don't allow foreigners to drive ever?
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular
situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet
response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment.
The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the
fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.
[...]
Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly
through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a
particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a
path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from
fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
I would assume that would apply here too.
But also, they aren't actually driving the car. They are giving hints to the autonomous driver.
Amazon admitted that they had a bunch of people in India looking at the camera feeds and validating orders post-facto. The media took this as "the Indian workers are processing your Amazon Fresh purchase, not the computers" which is disingenuous at best. And yeah, it sounds like Waymos usually, nearly always are fully autonomous.
The huge, gargantuan, enormous difference is that, in Waymo's case, the overseas folks are taking control of a fucking car. That's not post-facto like the Amazon thing. And, more importantly, the ramifications of even the tiniest mistake are massive by comparison.
Indian Amazon guy screws up? Shoot, I paid for two heads of lettuce when I only got one. Filipino Waymo guy screws up? Car accident.
By the way: Imagine driving a real, actual car with trans-oceanic ping.
they aren't though, they are clicking waypoints on a map
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
There's a massive difference between "widely known" and "widely known that it's widely known."
I mean they should be doing the same thing for truck drivers, train operators and airlines.
the problem with ignorance is that those who are ignorant aren't able to appreciate the bliss until after it's gone.
The real answer was probably - I shouldn't be the one who decides what happened to the person who killed my wife.
In the same way - It shouldn't be up to me if I get fired or my job gets shipped overseas or done by an AI. If we're in a free market it's up to all the people who are buying what I'm making. If there's a cheaper way why wouldn't they take it?
But also, even in the USA, we have 51+ different licensing schemes in the US. We already accept that if you have a license in one place, it's good in all the places.
HOWEVER:
It is entirely possible that some back room deals were made, and possibly laws put on the books in the states they've rolled out in.
I suspect more will come from this, eventually, especially if waymo is involved in accidents that involve insurance claims, injuries, or deaths in one of those states.
We know that eventually a self-driving car will hit somebody and kill them. Waymo and other companies are prepared for that.