Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police | Hacker News Reader

Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police

latimes.com

60 pointspilingual31 comments

I'm 99% sure that a human made these decisions after viewing the cameras in the vehicle, not that the Waymo vehicle itself decided to contact the police and park in a parking lot with these kids.

This honestly seems pretty ideal. In a dangerous situation, the only risk is property damage - there's no driver to threaten!

Agree. AI is not there yet, but it seems it is coming, and that would be scary. People will one day be in the scenario, where AI judges human behavior, and then decides what type of punishments to dish out based on it.

I personally think that frontier LLMs are already at the point where I trust them to be a better judge of human behavior than humans overall.

Absolutely. But they still hallucinate, I wouldn't want them to take action themselves, just flag things for human review.

Even in that context, to just be constantly flagging human actions, can be argued as reflective of a dystopian future. Always being monitored, and every viewable action recorded, categorized, and flagged.

Your view is dangerous because you don't see how this can be used to harm you.

> This honestly seems pretty ideal.

I disagree. A decent response would have been for the car to simply refuse to continue the ride rather than kidnapping the ne'er-do-wells.

That Waymo did this means that the hesitations I had about using the service are amplified by a few orders of magnitude. I'm not willing to risk someone at Waymo (or, worse, a machine at Waymo) making the wrong call and kidnapping me by mistake.

> A decent response would have been for the car to simply refuse to continue the ride rather than kidnapping the ne'er-do-wells.

It seems that's what exactly what they did? Except also called the police which seems the responsible thing to do when dropping drunk kids off somewhere

AI is just a tool. The real responsibility belongs to the developers, companies, and users who decide how it's built and used—not the AI itself. Anyway, that's insane. But if they were trying to damage the car, I can understand why Waymo reported them to the police.

As Benn Jordan pointed out, imagine what a hacker group or ICE could do with this. Fun times!

In my country (New Zealand) this would be very illegal

You cannot detain someone because you do not like their behavior, in almost all situations. In civilised countries

It is called kidnapping

My main concern is the deceit, "[s]topping for mechanical issues". Nah bruh

https://archive.ph/yUFqG

The car sent the San Mateo PD a report that the riders had toy projectile emitters (aka "guns," I suppose) they were using to shoot pellets at passers-by. It pulled into a parking lot until cops arrived. It doesn't report if it locked the riders in.

I was just thinking I want to try at least one joyride but no, now I'm not even interested in giving them those $20.

hmmm kidknapped due to a false positive would be a bit of an oops to try and rewind. its bad enough that the cops do it [just try and get them to give you a ride back to where thay took you from, even when they are told to cut you loose]

it causes real damages when you basically abduct and strand someone.

these "kids" were shooting orbees out the windows, so mischief on them, but get it wrong once and it could get expensive.

> these "kids" were shooting orbees out the windows, so mischief on them, but get it wrong once and it could get expensive

It would be a tiny settlement, particularly now that we have documented cases like this one where the policy is preventing real harm.

Like, if you're a kid drinking and shooting bystanders from the back of an Uber, what do you think is going to happen?

> Like, if you're a kid drinking and shooting bystanders from the back of an Uber, what do you think is going to happen?

I certainly don't think the Uber driver would hold me prisoner.

im thinking a human driver would WTF and pull over into a parking the instant the BB guns came out

And provide footage to Uber and the authorities. I don’t want to be in an Uber with a driver who wouldn’t.

You're not stranded... just call a Waymo.

Even if there was a way to remotely engage child lock, the front doors are still always unlocked from the inside.

The newer vehicles with the suicide doors don't have an emergency exit lever that I could find.

I suspect they weren't locked in and stayed because they didn't know the police were coming to their location.

Locking people in a car, remotely, as a private company, for "bad behavior", would be a mess.

One time I was settling into a long Waymo ride (about 15 miles through traffic) and it was rolling down a wide urban street where a white English-speaking guy like me is distinctly a minority.

And I was playing Pat Benatar's "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" with the windows wide open, and waving at other cars, and singing along at the top of my lungs, and eventually, Waymo Support rings in, and the guy goes, "just checking in! Is everything alright there?" and I go "er... yeah" and he goes "OK! thank you bye!"

So I decided maybe there had been an external complaint, and I should perhaps keep the windows up, and the music down a few notches from now on. Especially as a minority in such a neighborhood like that one.

Ha! I don't think there was an external complaint. I suspect that was the mic/cameras IN the car alerting support because you were loud and they wanted to make sure you were okay. :)

If you’re screaming for help vs singing on top of your lungs, it’s a minor difference. Worth a check.

Actually, Waymo explicitly notes that their mics are never activated until Support is on the line (and this is a very noticeable event) even though the video cameras are always monitoring. I mean, the way I was singing, they could probably guess at the audio!

So there is no way that Support heard or listened to the music or singing in-car. In fact, their own material says "mics are off... so sing your heart out!"

So I feel like it was some pedestrian who was perhaps racist or just offended that a Waymo passenger would be enjoying himself so much with Pat Benatar blasting, and just called-in a complaint. It seems the most prosaic explanation. I couldn't explain why Support would proactively just call in "for no reason" without anyone actually complaining about my particular vehicle.

I said mic/camera because I wasn't sure - I confirmed it's based on excess movement on the camera.

But one look at the video would confirm that I was 100% safe and in very good spirits. Why would they interrupt to inquire, if I was just having a good time alone? That makes no sense at all. It’s just a commercial taxi service. Surely there are dozens of customers every night who have a fun time on the way home from nightclubs and bars. There is no need for Support to waste resources by calling in and asking if they are ok.

The only other time that Support has called in to the car is when there was a hailstorm, and I hesitated to start the ride. Of course a passenger causing a delay in service is pretty good justification for calling in.

"100% safe and in very good spirits" could also mean extremely intoxicated. :) I think what they did was the right call.

What in the hell difference does it make if I was?

Once again, this is a taxi service. A commercial taxi service mostly spends its time picking up intoxicating passengers and keeping them off the road as drivers.

It would not matter if I was intoxicated unless I vomited. Did I vomit? Did they have any reason to call in? Did they ask me any questions when they called in except how I was doing? There was no indication that they thought I was intoxicated and it wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever.

I have no idea what you think a taxi company would do remotely to an intoxicated passenger. That is their job and purpose in life to transport intoxicated persons.

It may be instructive to point out that my vehicle's route was headed through the middle of a secure military installation. It is the Air National Guard McDowell Mountain civil defense. Obviously, a civilian highway goes past it and there was no problem with anybody driving on this road. But perhaps, cranking up angry and bitter Pat Benatar tracks from the 1980s, and literally asking people to shoot me was inviting people with guns on the side of the road to fire at the vehicle? I can't imagine what else they would do that. But they successfully discouraged me in keeping the windows all the way rolled down.

I think if the windows had been rolled up and nobody could hear me or my music from the outside, it would be completely different scene. And probably if I was not passing a secured military installation at the time, also no big deal. Also listening to a song about shooting and guns, probably not a good idea?

> I think what they did was the right call.

I don't. That's far, far too intrusive.

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