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tzs 3 hours ago

> Robotaxi supevision is just an emergency brake switch

That was the case when they first started the trial in Austin. The employee in the car was a safety monitor sitting in the front passenger seat with an emergency brake button.

Later, when they started expanding the service area to include highways they moved them to the driver seat on those trips so that they can completely take over if something unsafe is happening.

ssl-3 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting.

I wonder if these newly-reported crashes happened with the employee positioned in e-brake or in co-pilot mode.

tialaramex 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

Humans are extremely bad at vigilance when nothing interesting is happening. Lookout is a life critical role on the railways you might be assigned as a track worker where your whole job is to watch for railway trains and alert your co-workers when one is coming, so they retreat to a safe position while it passes. That seems easy, and these are typically close friends, you work with them every day rotating roles, you'd certainly not want them injured or killed - but it turns out it's basically impossible to stay vigilant for more than an hour or two tops. Having insisted that you aren't tired, since you're just stood somewhere watching while your mates are working hard on the track, you nevertheless lose focus and oops, a train passes without your conscious awareness and your colleague dies or has a life-changing injury.

This is awkward for any technologies where we've made it boring but not safe and so the humans must still supervise but we've made their job harder. Waymo understood that this is not a place worth getting to.