Government documents reveal new details about human nannies at Tesla and Waymo Robotaxis

They are self-driving vehicles Are they really just big, remote-controlled cars, with faceless, faceless people in remote call centers driving things from behind the consoles? As the vehicles and their sci-fi-like software expand into more cities, conspiracy theories around group chats and TikTok have spread. It has been fueled, in part, by the reluctance of self-driving car companies to talk in detail about the humans who help operate their robots.

But this month, in government documents filed by Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and electric car maker Tesla, the two companies revealed more details about the people and software that helps vehicles when their software goes haywire.

Industry experts say the details of these companies’ “remote assistance” programs are important because the humans supporting the robots play a critical role in ensuring cars drive safely on public roads. Even robots that operate smoothly most of the time encounter situations that their self-driving systems find confusing. See, for example, the December power outage in San Francisco that knocked out stop lights across the city, stranding disoriented Waymos at several intersections. Or the government is investigating several instances of these cars illegally driving near school buses that have stopped unloading students in Austin, Texas. (The latter prompted Waymo to issue a software recall.) When this happens, humans move cars out of congestion by directing or “advising” them from afar.

These functions are important because if people do them wrong, they can make the difference, for example, between a car stopping at a red light or starting it. “For the foreseeable future, there will be people who play a role in the behavior of vehicles, and therefore a role in safety,” says Philip Koopman, a researcher in autonomous vehicle software and safety at Carnegie Mellon University. One of the most difficult safety problems associated with autonomous driving, he says, is building software that knows when to ask for human help.

In other words: If you care about the safety of robots, care about people.

Waymo people

Waymo operates a paid robotaxi service in six metros — Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Area — and plans to launch it in at least 10 more cities, including London, this year. Now, in a blog post and letter submitted to U.S. Sen. Ed Markey this week, the company has announced more aspects of what it calls its “Remote Assistance” (RA) program, which uses remote workers to respond to requests from Waymo’s vehicle software when it determines it needs assistance. These humans provide data or advice to the systems, wrote Ryan McNamara, Waymo’s vice president and head of global operations. The system can use or reject information provided by humans.

“Waymo’s RAs provide advice and support to the Waymo driver but do not directly control, direct or drive the vehicle,” McNamara wrote, implicitly denying the charge that Waymos are merely remote-controlled cars. The company says about 70 assistants are working at any given time to monitor about 3,000 robotaxis. A low ratio indicates that cars are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

In its letter, Waymo also confirmed what one executive told Congress at a hearing earlier this month: Half of its remote assistance workers are contractors overseas, in the Philippines. (The company says it has two other remote help offices in Arizona and Michigan.) These workers are licensed to drive in the Philippines, but are trained in American road rules, McNamara wrote. The company says all remote assistance workers are drug and alcohol tested when hired, and 45 percent of them are tested every three months as part of Waymo’s random testing program.