[OgsyedIE]

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.

[dekhn]

The scope of their actions does not require them to have passed a driver's test.

[dataflow]

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.

[dekhn]

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.

[jayd16]

They're only in a few hyper-local areas.

[blibble]

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

[offnominal]

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.

[dekhn]

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.

[atq2119]

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.

[dekhn]

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.

[catlikesshrimp]

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.

[jeffbee]

The remote operators are not called upon to answer matters of law.

[Retric]

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.

[verdverm]

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

[Retric]

Those waypoints have legal implications.

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.

[dekhn]

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.

[Retric]

Waymo is operating in many locations outside of California such as Florida and Texas, and it intends to expand to many more states.

[circuit10]

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

[catmanjan]

If someone from the Phillipines clicks waypoints for a drone in Ukraine, is it a warcrime?

[turtlesdown11]

> answer matters of law

well yes, answering matters of law is the exclusive jurisdiction of judges