This particular situation, at face value at least, sounds like a good outcome. Kids had a gun, someone noticed, called police, situation handled without escalation or violence or something tragic happening.
But this doesn't generalize. Another incident described in the article was when some kids were drinking in the car and shooting toy guns. What if they hadn't been drinking? What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy.
The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine. (I recall a recent incident where someone was wrongfully arrested because one of the companies that run the license-plate reader machines flagged their car as stolen. The machine screwed up the image recognition, but the cops blindly trusted it and arrested the guy.)
What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always-on surveillance, and this will only get worse as autonomous vehicles become more popular in the taxi scene.
Imagine the alternative headline saying the murderers used Waymo for their drive-by assassination. There is only one option for Waymo here, and the idiocy of the US police is not within their power to solve.
The 90s were lit
Nah you're right tho let's imagine the worst case scenario. What if that person in the waymo had a nuclear bomb in their suitcase? There's only one option
I also grew up in the 90s and did things like throw eggs out of cars. We wouldn't have done it from a taxi or Uber. Your comment really makes no sense.
My wife and I like watching real-life police detective shows. Sometimes we discuss mistakes the killer made, and how we’d avoid them. “I wouldn’t kill anyone, but if I did, I wouldn’t cheap out and keep the clothes I wore to do it instead of tossing them into a river.” Of course we’re not going to do that, but it’s a puzzle to solve, so we try to solve it. We would not have those conversations around a taxi driver or a crowded subway, lest someone overhear and get the wrong idea. On an empty subway or Waymo? Yeah, sure. And if BART or my cab reported us for planning a murder, I’d be livid enough to plan how to murder the computer that made the decision to rat me out.
Every uber driver I’ve been ive been in has an inside dashcam to protect themselves and their property. I would do the same thing if I were them.
Waymo has every right to monitor their property and if someone does something illegal in their car why would they not report? An Uber driver would do the same, as would I. Otherwise you are an accomplice.
This comparison to Flock is bunk. Flock cameras are in public places and paid for with public dollars. I don’t want that.
But in a surveillance state, every private citizen should be keeping their own footage. Nobody is going to share theirs with you.
Other countries already have highway cameras track speed and automatically issue citations. I am happy for Americans to petition their government against implementing that, but I won't pretend it's anything other than a desire to break the law for personal gratification.
It's that way because real guns weren't available in Japan but real-ism wasn't defined, so Japanese toy gun brands just turned that volume up to 1100 without allowing toy guns take pressure bearing gun parts. And then those toy guns got exported and copied, leading to the present status.
Any gun shooting projectiles out of a moving vehicle is dangerous. Pellet guns and paintball guns are less dangerous than “regular” guns, but they’re not really toys.
We need to (be able to) trust the police to not escalate irresponsibly and to deal with situations with nuance. Declining to escalate to authorities because we're scared of what they may do is not great.
And it’s also not easy to tell toys from real guns. Many cities illegalized toy guns on public transit because people were putting orange tips on real guns to make them look like toys. 3D-printed guns rarely look like they can actually fire, even though they can.
And I'm not even convinced that human drivers would be more discerning or rational about it. They could easily overstate the issue to police and create a more biased situation.
Given how much money Google gives to electoral campaigns, I'd argue that it is in their power but that's the least of their problems when they interfere with the democratic process. They are too busy voting for less taxes and regulations on their business.
I take this seriously, but I think this a problem with the cops. Even regular people hesitate to report problems if they think the police might overreact.
Yea, what's disturbing about this article isn't what happened in the article--it's what will happen in the future.
Today, a corporation transmits to the police "user in possession of what appears to be a gun." Tomorrow, what will that message contain?
2. this is hardly a waymo/autonomous car/big tech thing. covid came with "vaccine passports" in some jurisdictions. there's no reason why it couldn't be enforced by human taxi drivers.
See this is only an issue because that is a plausible situation. The actual problem is on the police/cultural side, not the waymo side. No one should even have to think about this when calling the cops. And I can't think of 1 other western society where they do
you dont need a Waymo for that :(
Wayno picked a difficult market.
Same thing that happens whenever cops get new surveillance powers. They’ll use it to stalk and harass women.
And the sick part is how many useful idiots will go to bat for all of it because "well they broke the law after all"
Waymo is not the one to solve your policing problem. The root issue is that your police shoot to kill first, and investigate or make stuff up to get themselves off later.
the police's job is to analyze reports and actually figure out if theyre correct or not. If theyre failing at that, the rest really doesnt matter. Theyre gonna take some other stranger's report or false report and go shoot those kids for the love of the game anyways, regardless of if waymo is involved
Not to mention the mass surveillance this sort of stuff continues to help enable.
Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain. Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints. Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure. Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
These are just a few situations any human driver would obviously react to. And a modicum of detection and human review could solve in an autonomous vehicle.
And what surveillance or other risks does this introduce outside of the cabin, and why should society allow that? What is the definition of modicum of detection, and who is drawing that line?
It absolutely does 1000x. You can also just not use it.
Citation needed. Assaults and abuse against public transit and taxi drivers is a common workplace hazard. Why are we subjecting humans to that? Why are we ok expecting them to decide if a gun is fake or not and call the police?
>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
Absolutely.
>Absolutely.
Citation needed.
Why stop at Waymo? The entirety of your digital activity happens on private property. You should have no expectation of privacy, and your attempts at privacy should mark you as a higher risk subject. We should algorithmically police your digital life in case you start showing signs of anti-social behavior. I don't want to wait until you get your gun into a Waymo to have the cops handle you. I want you to be caught much earlier. This will make the world much safer.
There are other ways to solve safety issues, but they are harder and more expensive - civic education and a government invested in incentivizing a productive life, better law enforcement training, freely available mental health services etc.
Unfortunately taking someone somewhere to rob or assault them doesn’t look that different from taking a drunk friend to a safe place.
I am not against monitoring for safety - I am against deploying a sophisticated network of automated monitoring that covers all digital and soon physical aspects of my life for my "safety" by for profit companies.
How about things taking place outside the car?
Can Waymo mount a robotic machine gun next to the LIDAR and snipe suspected terrorists? Release tear gas? Self destruct, killing several nuns to protect s CEO?
Btw ghost guns are not all instantly illegal.
> Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain.
I take my kid to go skeet shooting. You’d call the police on us for having legal guns? What about my pocket knife?
> Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints.
My wife is scared by someone on the sidewalk. We’re riding to where we parked our car for the evening. There’s a scared woman with me as we commute to our vehicle. BART wouldn’t call the cops on me.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
What’s “obvious” here? I have drinks with friends and bump my head on a cabinet, and now I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not remotely about to die. Dammit, Waymo, I just want to go home and shower and let me wife laugh at me while she tapes me up.
> Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
Person’s exhausted after work and wants to nap on the way home. They look identical to the dead guy. BART lets you nap.
If we had ubiquitous taxi and subway police, maybe they’d spent 5 seconds assessing each situation and move on. In no other real-life situation do we expect empty subways or taxi drivers to call the cops and investigate every possible bad scenario, nor should we.
Only the few who can afford luxury deserve privacy.
It looks quite foolish to me to never plan ahead and predict undesirable future events and then trying to prevent them ahead of time.
"Sorry, we can't fulfill your request for transportation to the protest for private ownership, but we can offer a free ride to the Colosseum" ;)
That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.
Waymo called the cops. It’s not clear if it was the vehicle, or a human in the company. I suspect the latter.
So waymos means less busses/trains, which means a bunch of people stuck in the middle - they would prefer to take a bus or a train but the service is poorly maintained so they are forced to take a waymo.
Public infrastructure has been run by private companies for a long time.
That has changed. Networked cameras and AI means that cameras can be constantly monitored: license plates logged and mapped in realtime, faces scanned and profiled, symbols and objects detected.
I have no problem with calling the cops on someone with a gun. But that same kind of tech can (and has already been) seamlessly be turned on protestors, journalists, political opponents, union organizers, and ex girlfriends.
The alternative is having a driver in the car, which is equally intrusive.
Would you rather have one random stranger see you naked, or have a video of you naked passed around to every cop in your city?
Unless you feel the same about those two scenarios, it seems like a driver and a camera are not equally intrusive.
Half the ubers I've been now has a "you're being recorded" notice. Public transit is far worse.
Found their rules page: "Do not carry weapons of any kind in the car"
That seems... naive? Plenty of people carry pepper spray or a knife with them. Not even ever intending to use them as a weapon.
When I go to the range, I travel with a locked case that contains my pistol, which inside has a cable lock. I couldn't take that through a waymo?
What about some kid buying a goofy mall katana they are going to put on their wall?
Like, obviously brandishing a weapon should be disallowed, but merely having anything that's a weapon? Seems fraught.
Corporate speak for "concealed means concealed"
The steelman against* what waymo did is:*
Guns are generally legal, even in California. This is America, not the EU. Nobody was harmed, nobody was threatened. This is like calling the cops on someone open carrying because you don't like open carry.
That is what a lot of pro-2A libertarians would argue.
The steelman pro* what waymo did is:*
Private conveyance. Even though the occupants thought they were "alone", there was someone/something else present, which felt threatened (or thought the passengers represented a potential threat to others) and called police, as most cabbies or uber drivers probably would.
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. This is a grey area, and I think it'll likely resolve in favor of waymo, and it won't really bother anyone except the staunch libertarians.
When we have evidence that Waymo is contracting its external cameras out to local governments and allowing abuse, then we can criticize them for it.
The problem with Flock is that they let police hop on and look at whatever they want whenever they want. Completely different operating modes and intentions.
Also, Google and Waymo are different companies under the same parent. Google's policies are irrelevant.
"While companies like Waymo insist they require search warrants for footage, based on probable cause and judicial approval, the legal framework for accessing autonomous vehicle data remains unsettled. A 2022 analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) noted that few states have specific laws governing law enforcement access to such data, leaving gaps in oversight. In Arizona, where Waymo operates extensively, police must typically obtain a search warrant to access footage, as required by state law for electronic records and consistent with Fourth Amendment protections. "
At least a human usually has some judgment and discretion situationally.
I guess the alternative "Juvenile Driveby Shooting takes place from Waymo" isn't a better headline though.
You think “owning” the vehicle will matter in the near future? That’s cute
Why not? They can already take an uber. It's questionable which is safer
I understand the appeal. Parents I've spoken to feel safer putting their kid in a Waymo than and Uber. And I guess the time savings of not driving them around yourself are too compelling.
https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16389431?sjid=166657...
Well now my biggest fear of riding a Waymo is not how it drives but getting my Google account banned because it misdetected something.
However, kobalsky is alluding to frequent past reports of Google misdetecting things that are not ghost guns, followed by banning people's accounts. For example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... #news from 02022 of Google flagging Mark [anonymous]’s Google account for child porn when he sent a photo of his toddler son’s infected penis to the doctor and reported him to the police. The police decided no abuse had happened but he never got his account back. #privacy #human-rights #USA #politics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36443747 Very disturbing accounts of people getting banned from Google for searching for the board game "Ethnos", from credit cards for not using them, from Amazon for having a racist doorbell recording, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805 seems like people are getting banned from their #Google accounts for using #OpenClaw for #AI with #Gemini
https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w... more on people getting banned from their #Google accounts for using #OpenClaw for #AI with #Gemini:
Aminreza Khoshbahar: “I’m seeking assistance regarding a sudden restriction on my Google AI Ultra account that has persisted for three days. I received no prior warnings or notifications regarding a potential violation.
“The only recent change in my workflow was connecting Gemini models via OpenClaw OAuth. If third-party integrations are the issue, I would expect the platform to block the integration rather than restrict a paid account ($249/mo) without communication.”
I think this is awesome and I want more autonomous cars on the streets, replacing bad human drivers and calling the cops on kids with guns.
And why stop at cars? Maybe home cameras should call the cops if they see a weapon. Maybe your Apple Watch should detect if you’ve fired a gun. Brave new world!
The only issue is a somewhat wasteful use of police time - Waymo should have taken them straight to juvenile hall.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the cars are already capturing and storing license plates, tracking pedestrian activity.
It’s all being prepared for the sale to governments and intelligence communities. Or maybe to serve the privatized shit hole known as 'network states' coined by the pathetic parasite, Peter Thiel.
Orwellian dystopia is here folks. It just took a detour/roundabout way (9/11, patriot act, greedy capitalists, social media …) to get us there.
yeah fuck that. also fucks self-checkout. are we so poverty stricken as a society now that we can't afford to pay cashiers?
Yeah, I'm appalled how poor as a society we've become, now that we can't afford door men (outside of luxury condos in Manhattan), elevator operators, and bank tellers.
As a shopper, I don't want to be one of those people either. Ideally, I want lower friction and to be able to pay on my phone instead of dealing with the kiosk.