Kids in the PI are much better at paying attention to traffic, because it is utter fucking chaos in Manila, routing by a school is not particularly interesting. So they might feel better about providing waypoint near a school in the US than an American person would -- not realizing US children are comparatively retarded to Filipino children in dealing with traffic.
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.
I've seen this story making the rounds, but this isn't news, is it?
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?
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.
There's also the implicit xenophobia/offshoring angle that people in a call center in the Philippines must be doing low quality work and/or being exploited.
They are being exploited. They live in a lower cost-of-living country than where their services are rendered, and so neither demand nor receive the same wages as someone in the USA. The contracting company profits - quite intentionally! - from labour arbitrage.
Yeah but ironically it's actually the workers in the US who are being exploited. The workers in the developing countries are largely beneficiaries since they get access to wages and a labor market far beyond their local region. (Obviously the companies still benefit the most.)
One that I heard a lot is that if you're in the US during the day talking to an offshored tech support person, it's the middle of the night for them. The A-team doesn't work overnight, so you're getting at best second tier. blah blah
The guy says there are workers abroad, not exclusively in Phillipines. Phillipine call centers work when it is night in the US. There almost certainly is /are other centers in another location which work when it is daytime in the US.
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. "
He gave a non answer, quite surely on purpose. Since the interviewer didn't explicitly ask "Only in the Phillipines?", I can see the guy retorting "I never said there weren't operators in other places" (again, without saying which other places, or even if there is any other place)
It probably has more to do with the fact that Filipinos speak english. There's no other countries like that in Asia. I mean, Singapore I guess, but they're busy with their own things.
Should probably be licensed to drive in the US if “explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider” as Waymo has disclosed…
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?
It seems possible that people in the Philippines providing advice to Waymo vehicles in the US get some training on US road signage, traffic regulations, etc. (I can't see how it would make any sense for Waymo to pay people to do this and not give them the information they need to do it reasonably well, since the whole point is for them to handle difficult cases.)
And it would be difficult for whatever training Waymo provides to its employees to be less stringent than the lax license requirements of most US states.
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?
They are being exploited. I've traveled to Cebu City where many of these call centers are located. My wife is from the area. To Filipinos, it's a good job, but the quality of life for these workers is still very poor. It's not a living wage; most can't afford to live on their own.
As far as I understand it, they aren't being allowed to drive. They are doing the equivalent of "ignore that, it's not a real obstacle" or "try to go around this way", and then the car takes that input into account and does the actual driving (steering, control of throttle/brake) on it's own as usual.
I don't need, legally, to demonstrate any knowledge of this to drive on US roads currently (or even, strictly speaking, to know what side of the road I should drive on).
I'm not saying it's true or not true, I'm saying I don't know what "xenophobia" has to do with evaluating the quality of workers being used in potentially life-saving situations.
I'd have a way easier time buying the idea that there's genuine concern for the quality of this work if say, few Americans old enough to do so were licensed to drive. But er, actually it's estimated at almost 90% because the standards are extremely lax.
What "potentially life-saving situations" are you envisioning?
Nobody had mentioned any evaluation of anything. The Grandparent mentioned that xenophobia makes the headline more spicy. "Remote operator" phrase is not as attractive as "Remote operators from Phillipines" or even "Pinoys" can be.
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"
It's not lazy framing, this is what "journalism" is now. Push your agenda as far as you can, misrepresenting as many facts as you like. At the very end of your story -- which >85% will never get to -- walk back your misdirections with a paragraph or two of facts, right next to your bolded "sign up" text. None of this is unintentional or accidental.
I think in response to the propaganda and opinion that has been passed as journalism there are very compelling new journalism outlets like bellingcat. So there is hope and probably space for journalism that fills this gap.
This defense is missing the point. Yes, humans aren’t remote-driving the cars, and yes, most miles are autonomous. But the relevant question isn’t how often a human intervenes — it’s how many humans must be continuously available for the system to function at all. Even if interventions are rare, Waymo still needs operators on shift, fully alert, low-latency, and trained for local conditions, and that cost exists whether they’re doing something or not. Capacity planning is driven by correlated failures, not averages: blackouts, construction, special events, and weather can cause many vehicles to request help at once, and we’ve already seen queues form. That means the human layer is sized for worst-case concurrency, not “99.99% of miles.” So no, it’s not “just guys in the Philippines driving cars,” but it’s also not “so infrequent you wouldn’t believe.” It’s a highly autonomous system with a permanent human ops shadow, and the fact that this work is offshored strongly suggests that shadow is economically material. Miles are autonomous. Ops are not.
Well one concern could be something like - ride share companies already extracted a lot of the profit share of local taxi companies out of their local economies and moved it to Silicon Valley. But at least there were local jobs so a good amount of money stayed in the local economy.
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.
I assume you have sources for the claims you're making above? Like actual data on the number of people employed doing this work, how often they "guide" the car, etc? Otherwise it's hard to believe your claims.
Interesting, an immediate downvote asking for sources.
Yes it’s just because of the Philippines. The mention of the Philippines is triggering some additional scrutiny. When Waymo themselves announced this back in 2024[1] they made no mention of the country where these humans are located. Now people are raising questions about data sovereignty and local training such as U.S. driving license. Or if you are cynic you can say it’s xenophobia.
Yes, I think this is counting on the ignorance that people will believe there are "drone operators" at the console, halfway across the world, who are driving our cars [A.I. stands for "Actually Indians"?]
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.
>Yes, I think this is counting on the ignorance that people will believe there are "drone operators" at the console, halfway across the world, who are driving our cars [A.I. stands for "Actually Indians"?]
...
>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?
The article you link literally says that Tesla's teleoperation is the same kind as Waymo's, and there is nothing that the company has ever deployed that will enable "remote drone operators" so I don't know what your point is.
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.”
It's the question of whether these teams are composed of people who can pass a driving test in Waymo's areas of operation. I would be doubtful that they aren't but there appears to be no way for external verification of any kind.
I'm skeptical of this. Something as simple as knowing the meaning of curb painting color, turning on red, or knowing when to move past an emergency or other special vehicle requires non-universal knowledge of regulations, sometimes hyper-local. The idea that nothing they do would be affected by country-specific regulations is dubious.
Taking a driver's test, and knowing the meanings of road symbols are two different things. At no time did I imply the workers are completely ignorant of locale-specific driving details- I imagine they receive extensive training on this, but do not take a driver's test per se.
This is analogous to a situation where a passenger in a vehicle, for example, asks the driver to pull over or to drive to a given spot. I believe the passenger does not need to have a driving license to perform this task.
I have no specific knowledge of the law or the tech requirements here, but I don't think that the state of CA makes Google get CA driving licenses for its phillipines service employees.
There may be an is/ought confusion in your exchange.
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.
To be clear, California's legislators are paying close attention to Waymo, both because it's being deployed in their major cities, and because Alphabet is a California company.
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.
For the time being, they have a free colorless "foreign inept CSR which we don't employ" card when something happen; something always happens given enough time.
It’s 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.
I would assume that unsticking it requires forcing it to do maneuvers that it would otherwise refuse to do (or it would just unstick itself), so you'd need some knowledge of laws to do that
At worst, it's the outsourcing of cab drivers to remote roles in cheaper countries. No problem for the investors who are banking on another market disruption, since they're leaving the local society to hold the bag.
Think it is a much bigger deal than you’re making out, because we don’t have figures on how often the cars need assistance.
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.
We do know it's not all cars constantly, though. The PGE outage in San Francisco proved it, as anytime a Waymo came across a unpowered traffic light, it was configured to ask for assistance. This led to disaster, as there weren't close to enough humans to provide guidance to all the Waymos.
Partially, but also as an easy attack on "bad big tech" and AI - it wins votes right as primary season starts gearing up [1] during what is being treated by both the DNC and the GOP as a highly competitive election [0].
Ed Markey is going to face a severely harsh primary this election cycle (as are other incumbents in both parties this season).
Just been reading about the crash they’re talking about in the article - it seems like a kid walked out from between two parked cars.
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’.
Alternatively, maybe the car should have been driving more slowly. There is not enough information to know whether a human driver would have had a better outcome.
Do we know if there was space to swerve? I'm wondering if there was a vehicle next to the car, would swerving into it help slow down the Waymo or would it cause lose of breaking power and end up hitting the person at a faster speed?
A human doesn't have time to consider all that, it just seems to me that the instinctual move is to swerve. Hopefully the other cars are paying attention and swerve too.
Cars, no, but truckers have been damned for not just sacrificing themselves when their brakes failed. There was a recent incident where a truck had its brakes fail on its way into Denver from the Rockies and killed several people. They should have taken an off ramp, but IIRC, both in public opinion and in court it was argued that failing that they should have just committed suicide by going off the road before they hit a family.
The way this is being reported gives the impression that there are workers in the philippines remotely driving these cars (if they are, maybe google found a good use case for all that Stadia tech).
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.
What I found interesting about this is that on several occasions I've seen Waymos get confused and block intersections (and once Muni tracks). Each time they've sat there for at least 10-15 mins until a police officer showed up and tapped on the window. Then it was another 10-15 mins before the vehicle started to move again. What are these agents doing?
Waymo seems to be unnecessarily secretive about this. Why not let reporters visit the control centers? Zoox had the New York Times visit one a few years ago. It came out that there are about 1.5 support people per car. Nobody has a steering wheel. They hint to the cars by dropping "breadcrumbs" on screen.
The ratio of workers to cars matters more, imo, than whether the workers drive the cars. The fundamental sell of self-driving is that it saves labor. If it effectively doesn't, self-driving essentially going to a luxury rather than a replacement for the existing models.
From what I understand, Waymo has never hidden the fact that they have remote operators, and also they have clarified that the remote operators are not actually "driving" the car (in the sense that they are not using a remote steering wheel and pedals).
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.
It's not an attack, it's a statement, and he recently had a popular post about this (not linking it here, as he does not take kindly to links from hacker news).
How does one turn "Tesla has computer-connected steering wheels at their office" into "Tesla robotaxis as controlled by remote workers with steering wheels on their desks"?
This reminds me of people saying that ChatGPT was actually just quick typists from India, back in 2022.
The Amazon Go situation was also wildly misrepresented in media, to be clear. It's fairly obvious that they did actually have some vaguely accurate video processing tech, it's just that the reliability never hit a level that the cost of fixing up errors actually saved money vs the alternative.
(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?)
I'm guessing it is for situations like should the Waymo stay in a particular lane or switch lanes, try to overtake another car, etc. That's probably the type of "guidance", which seems a lot like optimization.
The resurgence of this seems to be another addition to the sort of culture war that is going on right now around ai v human labour. I suspect this sort of thing will continue to make hay in the press over the coming year
Fun fact, if they are using foreign workers at all, however briefly, they are likely in violation of state law in multiple states.
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.
IIRC from when Waymo discussed this previously, the remote people don't drive the car, they issue instructions to the autonomous driver. If that's the case they shouldn't need a driving licence.
Wouldn't it be risky to do that? This is a multi-billion dollar gamble being executed in front of the public, egregiously breaking the law or making back-room deals both risk extreme negative public reaction if exposed.
We know that eventually a self-driving car will hit somebody and kill them. Waymo and other companies are prepared for that.
If a person from the Philippines comes to the USA, they are allowed to drive on our roads as long as they have a valid license in the Philippines (no international permit required).
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.
I think this is a key question. In the May 2024 blog post about "fleet response" it sounds like Waymo has a lawyerly set of rules they follow to distinguish between remote operation and providing guidance to the self-driving system.
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.
Has Waymo been responsible, in any material way, for any deaths? To my knowledge they have not. (from a quick search: their cars have been involved in one fatal collision total, where a "SUV rear-ends stopped vehicle behind stopped Waymo at high speed, one passenger in the human-driven car and animal declared dead", a situation in which their car was obviously only peripherally involved)
It's hard to say what this means. They didn't give a single example of the kinds of situations the remote workers help in. I can think of an array of different kinds of situations ranging from "should I continue with this route or turn back" which would be a yes/no dialog box with the car prompting monitoring to real time pedal inputs or emergency stops by people watching the displays constantly.
~~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.~~
I mean, Waymo gives a lot of examples of the situations, in their blog post about Fleet Response where they detail this, released May 21, 2024. They're very explicit that the Waymo Driver autonomous system is in control the entire time.
Thanks for this link. I’ve failed to find specifics on this for a while but this is pretty good, particularly the example about which lane to choose when cones are set up.
So everyone saying "oh but they told us this" is completely missing the point; it's like those weird logic problems where everyone on the island has a dot on their head or whatever.
There's a massive difference between "widely known" and "widely known that it's widely known."
people who are looking for work. you will too one day when you're finally kicked out of the pool, and discover your assumptions about why you had work in the past were wrong.
the problem with ignorance is that those who are ignorant aren't able to appreciate the bliss until after it's gone.
I don't have any problem with Waymos having a human in the loop for assistance, but sending all of our jobs to other countries is destroying the United States.
Shouldn't these workers in Phillipines be required to be licensed to drive cars in the USA to operate those vehicles (even remotely)? I understand that they're not really driving those cars. But they've control over these cars and they do operate them when required on public roads.
International drivers are allowed to drive on US roads as long as they have a valid license in their own country. In particular, Filipino drivers are allowed to drive on US roads without any extra paperwork.
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.
Indeed. I can rent a car and drive in the US, despite having learnt to drive and only having a driving license from a country which drives on the other side of the road.
Er, this was reported by waymo themselves nearly two years ago: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
Nothing about the Philippines in that.
Why does it matter if fleet response sit in Manilla, Miami or Milan?
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.
I'd trust Manilla drivers over Miami drivers any day. They are tempered in a hotter furnace
Kids in the PI are much better at paying attention to traffic, because it is utter fucking chaos in Manila, routing by a school is not particularly interesting. So they might feel better about providing waypoint near a school in the US than an American person would -- not realizing US children are comparatively retarded to Filipino children in dealing with traffic.
Anything for a clickable headline...
It's been speculated: Is this why there was that debacle with multiple Waymos in intersections during the recent blackout?
Waymo reported that too: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r...
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.
I've seen this story making the rounds, but this isn't news, is it?
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?
Well, it's being framed both ways.
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.
There's also the implicit xenophobia/offshoring angle that people in a call center in the Philippines must be doing low quality work and/or being exploited.
They are being exploited. They live in a lower cost-of-living country than where their services are rendered, and so neither demand nor receive the same wages as someone in the USA. The contracting company profits - quite intentionally! - from labour arbitrage.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Outsourc...
People from the West always complain when people from the developing world are hired to do work for people in the west.
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.
> They are being exploited. They live in a lower cost-of-living country
So tech companies should be barred from hiring anyone outside the Bay Area? Because hiring someone in Texas or Arizona is necessarily exploitation?
Yeah but ironically it's actually the workers in the US who are being exploited. The workers in the developing countries are largely beneficiaries since they get access to wages and a labor market far beyond their local region. (Obviously the companies still benefit the most.)
Shouldn't pay be scaled to the locale? Note also the role here is fungible- Waymo could move to another location if they chose.
I think people tend to distrust an assumed lowest bidder regardless of whether they're from here or from over there.
One that I heard a lot is that if you're in the US during the day talking to an offshored tech support person, it's the middle of the night for them. The A-team doesn't work overnight, so you're getting at best second tier. blah blah
The guy says there are workers abroad, not exclusively in Phillipines. Phillipine call centers work when it is night in the US. There almost certainly is /are other centers in another location which work when it is daytime in the US.
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. "
The way the Waymo rep answered strongly implied they only have workers on this task in the The Philippines.
--
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..
He gave a non answer, quite surely on purpose. Since the interviewer didn't explicitly ask "Only in the Phillipines?", I can see the guy retorting "I never said there weren't operators in other places" (again, without saying which other places, or even if there is any other place)
It probably has more to do with the fact that Filipinos speak english. There's no other countries like that in Asia. I mean, Singapore I guess, but they're busy with their own things.
I think it is more specifically that Filipinos tend to speak English with a more American accent, unlike English-speakers in (say) India.
Offshoring our good, American, pretending to be a robot car jobs.
Because outsourced work is often a race to the bottom price wise, resulting in skilled workers finding better higher paying work elsewhere?
There are highly talented people in every country. The vast majority of them do not work in call centres.
Should probably be licensed to drive in the US if “explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider” as Waymo has disclosed…
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?
It seems possible that people in the Philippines providing advice to Waymo vehicles in the US get some training on US road signage, traffic regulations, etc. (I can't see how it would make any sense for Waymo to pay people to do this and not give them the information they need to do it reasonably well, since the whole point is for them to handle difficult cases.)
And it would be difficult for whatever training Waymo provides to its employees to be less stringent than the lax license requirements of most US states.
Super interesting take you mentiom.
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?
They are being exploited. I've traveled to Cebu City where many of these call centers are located. My wife is from the area. To Filipinos, it's a good job, but the quality of life for these workers is still very poor. It's not a living wage; most can't afford to live on their own.
"most can't afford to live on their own"
That's true for a lot of workers in many USA cities as well.
It's a good job but they can't live on it? I think you mean they can't live like westerners.
Why is it xenophobic to be concerned that non-registered drivers in one country are being allowed to drive remotely in a different country.
As far as I understand it, they aren't being allowed to drive. They are doing the equivalent of "ignore that, it's not a real obstacle" or "try to go around this way", and then the car takes that input into account and does the actual driving (steering, control of throttle/brake) on it's own as usual.
You're saying they don't interpret road signs/markings/etc.? Or need to know if e.g. a right or left turn on red is legal in a given intersection?
I don't need, legally, to demonstrate any knowledge of this to drive on US roads currently (or even, strictly speaking, to know what side of the road I should drive on).
It's been quite a while, but I'm pretty sure there was a written part back when I did the driving test for my first license.
Yeah (at least, that's probably the case in some parts of the US), but I didn't pass my test in the US.
It might be for non road code level issues, like physics / crowd ambiguity, where a normal human could fill the missing gaps, US citizen or not.
Why is it xenophobia if it could be true?
as someone with zero love for waymo/alphabet, why would you believe it to be true?
I'm not saying it's true or not true, I'm saying I don't know what "xenophobia" has to do with evaluating the quality of workers being used in potentially life-saving situations.
I'd have a way easier time buying the idea that there's genuine concern for the quality of this work if say, few Americans old enough to do so were licensed to drive. But er, actually it's estimated at almost 90% because the standards are extremely lax.
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
Nobody had mentioned any evaluation of anything. The Grandparent mentioned that xenophobia makes the headline more spicy. "Remote operator" phrase is not as attractive as "Remote operators from Phillipines" or even "Pinoys" can be.
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"
> It's so infrequent you wouldn't believe
Is there a publicly disclosed number we can use to verify this claim?
This is purely anecdotal but I've heard from other riders that the car tells you when it's happening, and it's never happened in my 10+ rides so far.
It's not lazy framing, this is what "journalism" is now. Push your agenda as far as you can, misrepresenting as many facts as you like. At the very end of your story -- which >85% will never get to -- walk back your misdirections with a paragraph or two of facts, right next to your bolded "sign up" text. None of this is unintentional or accidental.
I think in response to the propaganda and opinion that has been passed as journalism there are very compelling new journalism outlets like bellingcat. So there is hope and probably space for journalism that fills this gap.
If it's so infrequent why do they need to offshore it?
Infrequent things happen all the time at scale?
Their scale is like 2000 cars…
They're scaling exponentially, so they have to plan operations accordingly.
A. ML engineers don't want to do it B. Phillipine labellers are way cheaper C. All of the above
Time zone coverage would be an obvious reason to have overseas teams.
Because it's cheaper, duh
This defense is missing the point. Yes, humans aren’t remote-driving the cars, and yes, most miles are autonomous. But the relevant question isn’t how often a human intervenes — it’s how many humans must be continuously available for the system to function at all. Even if interventions are rare, Waymo still needs operators on shift, fully alert, low-latency, and trained for local conditions, and that cost exists whether they’re doing something or not. Capacity planning is driven by correlated failures, not averages: blackouts, construction, special events, and weather can cause many vehicles to request help at once, and we’ve already seen queues form. That means the human layer is sized for worst-case concurrency, not “99.99% of miles.” So no, it’s not “just guys in the Philippines driving cars,” but it’s also not “so infrequent you wouldn’t believe.” It’s a highly autonomous system with a permanent human ops shadow, and the fact that this work is offshored strongly suggests that shadow is economically material. Miles are autonomous. Ops are not.
The fleet of human operators manage many details of Waymo rides.
* Interpreting traffic laws
* Managing construction
* Navigating unusual intersections
* Re-routing due to traffic or other unusual conditions
* Safety threshold intervene
Well one concern could be something like - ride share companies already extracted a lot of the profit share of local taxi companies out of their local economies and moved it to Silicon Valley. But at least there were local jobs so a good amount of money stayed in the local economy.
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.
I assume you have sources for the claims you're making above? Like actual data on the number of people employed doing this work, how often they "guide" the car, etc? Otherwise it's hard to believe your claims.
Interesting, an immediate downvote asking for sources.
"So infrequent that we wouldnt believe" and yet in order to save costs they had to use humans from the Phillipines?
Yes it’s just because of the Philippines. The mention of the Philippines is triggering some additional scrutiny. When Waymo themselves announced this back in 2024[1] they made no mention of the country where these humans are located. Now people are raising questions about data sovereignty and local training such as U.S. driving license. Or if you are cynic you can say it’s xenophobia.
[1]: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
Yes, I think this is counting on the ignorance that people will believe there are "drone operators" at the console, halfway across the world, who are driving our cars [A.I. stands for "Actually Indians"?]
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.
Maybe A.I. needs to be updated to stand for “Actually Islanders”, now.
(I’m kidding, of course — you’re right that the Actually Indians meme is a gross distortion of reality.)
>Yes, I think this is counting on the ignorance that people will believe there are "drone operators" at the console, halfway across the world, who are driving our cars [A.I. stands for "Actually Indians"?]
... >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...
The article you link literally says that Tesla's teleoperation is the same kind as Waymo's, and there is nothing that the company has ever deployed that will enable "remote drone operators" so I don't know what your point is.
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.
The article says this about the job:
> 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.”
It's the question of whether these teams are composed of people who can pass a driving test in Waymo's areas of operation. I would be doubtful that they aren't but there appears to be no way for external verification of any kind.
The scope of their actions does not require them to have passed a driver's test.
I'm skeptical of this. Something as simple as knowing the meaning of curb painting color, turning on red, or knowing when to move past an emergency or other special vehicle requires non-universal knowledge of regulations, sometimes hyper-local. The idea that nothing they do would be affected by country-specific regulations is dubious.
Taking a driver's test, and knowing the meanings of road symbols are two different things. At no time did I imply the workers are completely ignorant of locale-specific driving details- I imagine they receive extensive training on this, but do not take a driver's test per se.
They're only in a few hyper-local areas.
so they can't induce movement of the vehicle, at all, ever?
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
This is analogous to a situation where a passenger in a vehicle, for example, asks the driver to pull over or to drive to a given spot. I believe the passenger does not need to have a driving license to perform this task.
I have no specific knowledge of the law or the tech requirements here, but I don't think that the state of CA makes Google get CA driving licenses for its phillipines service employees.
There may be an is/ought confusion in your exchange.
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.
To be clear, California's legislators are paying close attention to Waymo, both because it's being deployed in their major cities, and because Alphabet is a California company.
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.
For the time being, they have a free colorless "foreign inept CSR which we don't employ" card when something happen; something always happens given enough time.
The remote operators are not called upon to answer matters of law.
Moving a car on public streets is a matter of law even if the car is interpreting moderately high level directions like make a U turn here.
Especially as the car is already having issues when they takeover.
They aren't moving the car, they are answering customer calls and clicking waypoints on a map to unstuck the car when it phones home "I'm confused"
It's click bait for people's priors
Those waypoints have legal implications.
It’s 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.
In California (and I think most places) it's not illegal to make a (legal) U-turn to avoid a police checkpoint or otherwise avoid a checkpoint.
I would assume that unsticking it requires forcing it to do maneuvers that it would otherwise refuse to do (or it would just unstick itself), so you'd need some knowledge of laws to do that
If someone from the Phillipines clicks waypoints for a drone in Ukraine, is it a warcrime?
> answer matters of law
well yes, answering matters of law is the exclusive jurisdiction of judges
At worst, it's the outsourcing of cab drivers to remote roles in cheaper countries. No problem for the investors who are banking on another market disruption, since they're leaving the local society to hold the bag.
Think it is a much bigger deal than you’re making out, because we don’t have figures on how often the cars need assistance.
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.
We do know it's not all cars constantly, though. The PGE outage in San Francisco proved it, as anytime a Waymo came across a unpowered traffic light, it was configured to ask for assistance. This led to disaster, as there weren't close to enough humans to provide guidance to all the Waymos.
all self driving companies? are you sure about that?
There was a big to-do made about this by one senator(?) during the hearing.
Same old same old. Some of them actually know stuff. Others are examples of 20th century "Artificial Intelligence." (Got briefed by their staff.)
Partially, but also as an easy attack on "bad big tech" and AI - it wins votes right as primary season starts gearing up [1] during what is being treated by both the DNC and the GOP as a highly competitive election [0].
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
[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOwRbOK93ag
Just been reading about the crash they’re talking about in the article - it seems like a kid walked out from between two parked cars.
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’.
Alternatively, maybe the car should have been driving more slowly. There is not enough information to know whether a human driver would have had a better outcome.
17 MPH is already pretty slow. School zones near me have a 25 mph speed limit.
Reducing speed is great, but isn't a swerve called for in that situation?
Do we know if there was space to swerve? I'm wondering if there was a vehicle next to the car, would swerving into it help slow down the Waymo or would it cause lose of breaking power and end up hitting the person at a faster speed?
A human doesn't have time to consider all that, it just seems to me that the instinctual move is to swerve. Hopefully the other cars are paying attention and swerve too.
not if the swerve would put you headlong into oncoming traffic
It wouldn't be headlong, possibly sidelong though. Seems worth it to save a kid, no?
neither cars nor humans are expected to solve trolley problems during real-time incidents.
Cars, no, but truckers have been damned for not just sacrificing themselves when their brakes failed. There was a recent incident where a truck had its brakes fail on its way into Denver from the Rockies and killed several people. They should have taken an off ramp, but IIRC, both in public opinion and in court it was argued that failing that they should have just committed suicide by going off the road before they hit a family.
The way this is being reported gives the impression that there are workers in the philippines remotely driving these cars (if they are, maybe google found a good use case for all that Stadia tech).
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.
What I found interesting about this is that on several occasions I've seen Waymos get confused and block intersections (and once Muni tracks). Each time they've sat there for at least 10-15 mins until a police officer showed up and tapped on the window. Then it was another 10-15 mins before the vehicle started to move again. What are these agents doing?
Filipino here..
I always wondered why "Taxi Cab Simulator 7" looked so realistic.
Waymo seems to be unnecessarily secretive about this. Why not let reporters visit the control centers? Zoox had the New York Times visit one a few years ago. It came out that there are about 1.5 support people per car. Nobody has a steering wheel. They hint to the cars by dropping "breadcrumbs" on screen.
Waymo has had blog posts detailing this stuff.
The ratio of workers to cars matters more, imo, than whether the workers drive the cars. The fundamental sell of self-driving is that it saves labor. If it effectively doesn't, self-driving essentially going to a luxury rather than a replacement for the existing models.
From what I understand, Waymo has never hidden the fact that they have remote operators, and also they have clarified that the remote operators are not actually "driving" the car (in the sense that they are not using a remote steering wheel and pedals).
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.
It's pretty weird of you to use this post to attack a specific individual.
It's not an attack, it's a statement, and he recently had a popular post about this (not linking it here, as he does not take kindly to links from hacker news).
People who think this is a "gotcha!" for Waymo are either not very well educated, not very smart, or both.
Why is that?
Unlike Waymo, Tesla robotaxis as controlled by remote workers with steering wheels on their desks, see: https://youtu.be/X8XFsROXifY?t=924
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.
How does one turn "Tesla has computer-connected steering wheels at their office" into "Tesla robotaxis as controlled by remote workers with steering wheels on their desks"?
This reminds me of people saying that ChatGPT was actually just quick typists from India, back in 2022.
The Amazon Go situation was also wildly misrepresented in media, to be clear. It's fairly obvious that they did actually have some vaguely accurate video processing tech, it's just that the reliability never hit a level that the cost of fixing up errors actually saved money vs the alternative.
(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?)
Old news, I wrote about this almost 2 years ago: https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/is-teleoperated-driving-pavi...
FYI to anyone clicking, it's a paid link.
I'm guessing it is for situations like should the Waymo stay in a particular lane or switch lanes, try to overtake another car, etc. That's probably the type of "guidance", which seems a lot like optimization.
These videos from Waymo shows what kind of guidance they provide:
https://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.
The resurgence of this seems to be another addition to the sort of culture war that is going on right now around ai v human labour. I suspect this sort of thing will continue to make hay in the press over the coming year
You would wonder how many US healthcare businesses use customer service reps and other workers in PH.
Fun fact, if they are using foreign workers at all, however briefly, they are likely in violation of state law in multiple states.
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.
IIRC from when Waymo discussed this previously, the remote people don't drive the car, they issue instructions to the autonomous driver. If that's the case they shouldn't need a driving licence.
Wouldn't it be risky to do that? This is a multi-billion dollar gamble being executed in front of the public, egregiously breaking the law or making back-room deals both risk extreme negative public reaction if exposed.
We know that eventually a self-driving car will hit somebody and kill them. Waymo and other companies are prepared for that.
what state law would they be violating?
Don't all companies use remote workers in the Philippines?
I think it’s funny how this can be framed: Self-driving cars facilitate the offshoring of local jobs.
The goal of it all is to reduce the costs of labor (you, basically). On that, AI and robotics are doing just fine !
The labor Waymo reduces is Uber drivers. How is that me basically? I'm not an Uber driver.
From a legal standpoint: do these people need valid drivers licenses?
If a person from the Philippines comes to the USA, they are allowed to drive on our roads as long as they have a valid license in the Philippines (no international permit required).
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.
I think this is a key question. In the May 2024 blog post about "fleet response" it sounds like Waymo has a lawyerly set of rules they follow to distinguish between remote operation and providing guidance to the self-driving system.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-responseI’d be curious about situations where latency or outages result in deaths of people who have not signed the waymo TOS.
Has Waymo been responsible, in any material way, for any deaths? To my knowledge they have not. (from a quick search: their cars have been involved in one fatal collision total, where a "SUV rear-ends stopped vehicle behind stopped Waymo at high speed, one passenger in the human-driven car and animal declared dead", a situation in which their car was obviously only peripherally involved)
I have no idea. I never suggested they have already happened, but I am certain that they will.
I'd be curious about situations where human drivers have caused the deaths of people who didn't sign the driver's TOS.
It's hard to say what this means. They didn't give a single example of the kinds of situations the remote workers help in. I can think of an array of different kinds of situations ranging from "should I continue with this route or turn back" which would be a yes/no dialog box with the car prompting monitoring to real time pedal inputs or emergency stops by people watching the displays constantly.
~~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.
I mean, Waymo gives a lot of examples of the situations, in their blog post about Fleet Response where they detail this, released May 21, 2024. They're very explicit that the Waymo Driver autonomous system is in control the entire time.
This isn't something new.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
Thanks for this link. I’ve failed to find specifics on this for a while but this is pretty good, particularly the example about which lane to choose when cones are set up.
Very helpful, thank you.
So everyone saying "oh but they told us this" is completely missing the point; it's like those weird logic problems where everyone on the island has a dot on their head or whatever.
There's a massive difference between "widely known" and "widely known that it's widely known."
I dont like that story like this gets upvoted to frontpage top 10 when its just a nothing burger :'(
who cares
people who are looking for work. you will too one day when you're finally kicked out of the pool, and discover your assumptions about why you had work in the past were wrong.
the problem with ignorance is that those who are ignorant aren't able to appreciate the bliss until after it's gone.
Interesting to watch mainstream media cover something while pretending it is new news. Same thing with various aspects of the Epstein matter.
So "autonomous" vehicles are not actually autonomous. AV companies are so scummy.
i can't imagine what this thread would look like if it turned out tesla was doing it!
I don't have any problem with Waymos having a human in the loop for assistance, but sending all of our jobs to other countries is destroying the United States.
Sorry but Google is a multinational corporation. It makes profites and products everywhere in the world. You should probably open the eyes.
Downvoted by all the thirdies destroying this site.
So now you don't want capitalism?
Okay, lets do your job and career next! Just capitalism bro.
Shouldn't these workers in Phillipines be required to be licensed to drive cars in the USA to operate those vehicles (even remotely)? I understand that they're not really driving those cars. But they've control over these cars and they do operate them when required on public roads.
International drivers are allowed to drive on US roads as long as they have a valid license in their own country. In particular, Filipino drivers are allowed to drive on US roads without any extra paperwork.
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.
Indeed. I can rent a car and drive in the US, despite having learnt to drive and only having a driving license from a country which drives on the other side of the road.