It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles
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. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
In other words, much like Waymo tries to put a nice spin on it, their cars are not fully autonomous and despite the wording of the article above, they are not "operating a fully autonomous service". Nor can the Waymo Driver "confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events" it "regularly encounter[s] when driving millions of miles a week".
They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
> 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.
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> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Waymo prevaricates about the "influence" the human operator has on the path taken by the Waymo Driver [1] but it is clear there are situations that the Waymo Driver cannot choose point A and point B on its own, at least safely, otherwise Waymo would not be paying for humans to do it. They'd let the system do it on its own. It can't. It's not "fully autonomous".
We can play with words and accept whatever terminological obfuscation Waymo wants to impose in order to pimp its wares, or we can accept that current systems have limitations, and choose to understand the real SOTA over marketing.
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[1] 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 idib.
1. They're not "safety drivers" in the sense that most people understand, ie. someone dedicated to watching the car
2. What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever? If a vending machine works 99% of the time, and 1% of the time needs some technician to come to get a drink unstuck does it make sense to get up and arms about how it's not "fully automated" or whatever? In all contexts why people would care (eg. unit economics, safety, customer experience), there's no meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous.
It's like that time with Facebook and MySpace. A while ago now. I was in a student group at uni and this student, call her Alice, asked me for my Facebook. I said I don't have one, I don't like Facebook, and the conversation continued. Later another student came in, call him Bob. Alice told Bob "Where were you, we just had a big fight about Facebook over Myspace". I asked when that happened since I was there and didn't remember it and Alice said "that was me and you. We had a big fight about it. Did you forget?". I said, nonplussed, that I didn't think we had a fight. "But you said you don't like Facebook. So you like MySpace". Said Alice. Oh Alice.
From that I understand that you, like Alice, must be a very astute observer of human behaviour. No hidden motive stays hidden for long, with you, does it? Well done. You got me. I'm a Tesla fanboi. That's what I am, through and through.
Yeah, good point. If Waymo were honest they'd say their system is "autonomous". Fully autonomous implies 100% autonomy. Otherwise, how is it "fully"?
But, hey, don't ask me. Write a paper with robot that is 99% autonomous but a human has to take control every once in a while and see how easy you can get that past any reviewer in robotics or AI.
So we just made driving a million times more efficient for human labor input
Even if human controllers actually could pay attention 100% of the time, they'd struggle to respond in time to a lot of dangerous situations. Most accidents happen when one of the cars (or their drivers) fails to react in time with what is effectively a split second decision.
Autonomous driving (with or without a controller) means a computer takes essentially all of those decisions for the simple reason that any human controller would probably be too late way too often.
Once you accept that simple logical reality, the role of that controller becomes more clear: they are there to step in and provide instructions to the car when it encounters some challenging situation and slows down, pulls over, or stops in a safe place. This probably doesn't involve any joysticks or steering wheels.
Controller responses are not real time critical. They can't be. It would fail to work too often. Also, most controllers probably need to monitor more than one car. Which only makes the problem worse. And they might have to juggle two stuck cars at once.
Mostly autonomous cars are pretty good at object detection and not crashing into stuff (all the real time stuff). It's object classification and interpreting complex situations where cars get stuck or might sometimes still do dangerous/illegal/sub optimal things. Getting stuck or slowing down is fine. The human controller can fix that. Doing the wrong thing is more problematic.
Not 99% of a chauffeur, 100%. (or 99.99999%)
The roll out of this is clearly limited by the number of remote employees that are filling in the 1%.
In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?
Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.
I don't have to argue about Tesla or what other people are saying about Tesla.