Power outage deflates Waymo safety mythology
How did no one anticipate city-wide outages, stranded Waymos?
I realize that by even writing these thoughts I risk being labelled as knee-jerk negative, or at least seriously skeptical.
But I think it’s worth discussing. When I saw the clips of the wayward Waymos, lost and stranded in the middle of California’s terrible December 20/21st power outage, I could not help but feel a rush of schadenfreude.
“Schadenfreude” is a German term that describes “pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune,” according to Oxford online. I don’t derive any pleasure from imagining the chaos and terror experienced by thousands of San Francisco residents who lost power as the result of a fire at power generator PG&E.
I am feeling some satisfaction, however, at the puncturing of the demoralizing narrative currently being propagated by professional driving industries: this is, the mean-spirited mythology that human drivers are no longer needed because now, we have LiDAR technology.
As the cruel new folklore goes, not only will those (mostly male) professional drivers who’ve devoted their lives to keeping people and goods moving not be needed anymore because of autonomous technology, but the technology is also going to be better and safer than the human drivers ever were.
Thanks for nothin’, fellas. Don’t let the car door hit you in the ass on the way out.
As noted in previous columns, I read so many press releases and media reports around the launch events of autonomous products (cars, trucks, drones, mini-delivery carts…) I can’t help but notice glaring exaggerations. You really have to be able to suspend disbelief before you read the promotional copy; and then, resist slitting your wrists when you see the exact same bumpf being presented as “news coverage” by an unquestioning media.
Thanks for nothin’, fellas. Don’t let the car door hit you in the ass on the way out.
The new autonomous product is going to be cheaper, faster, safer and more reliable than a human being. They’re going to reduce congestion and emissions and improve the quality of life for everyone. They will, as Elon Musk crowed at the launch of his RoboTaxi, “Turn parking lots into parks!”
But it’s not enough for product promoters to simply work at selling a new product: they also seem to feel the need to slam the human beings who’ve done this indispensable work for decades.
Human responsiveness, creativity, ingenuity, even basic common sense and reliability don’t even rate a mention. These attributes aren’t considered necessary or even desirable; the very elements that make a human being with a service attitude great are tossed aside in the rush to prove digital superiority.
“A new peer-reviewed study confirms what we’ve long believed: self-driving cars aren’t just futuristic—they’re a safer way to get around. Waymo’s autonomous fleet logged 56.7 million miles and dramatically outperformed human drivers in almost every crash scenario,” reads Grow SF News.
Never mind the fact that there aren’t many Waymos driving on highways, or in snow, let alone on snowy highways. Even the Waymos driving only in sunny San Francisco skidded to a halt when that city’s power went out December 21st.
Whoops! I wonder how a Waymo stopped dead at a powerless traffic light gets counted in the methodology of the engineers measuring whether autonomous is safer than human common sense?
”It is not straightforward to compute confidence intervals on the any-injury-reported underreporting estimate because it is derived from multiple sources. There is also evidence that underreporting may differ between localities, meaning a national estimate may not fully represent underreporting in the cities Waymo operates in….”
Yeah, whatever.
I recall a memorable discussion with an engineer once about why it would be necessary to send human beings to Mars in order to truly learn about Mars.
“Couldn’t we just send robots, to send data back to Earth?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.
The engineer sighed at my naiveté.
“Well, for example, if the robot needed to deal with something unanticipated, it would need to send a signal back to Earth and request instructions. Then the scientists on Earth would need to send instructions and hope they were right,” he explained.
“So, what’s the problem with that?” I asked. I was totally on the side of putting robots in Martian danger and keeping frail human beings safe.
“Rita, it could take an hour for a signal to get to Mars and back to Earth again. ANYTHING could happen in that hour….you could get in an endless loop of instructions which are actually making the situation worse instead of better. A human astronaut would make those decisions instantaneously.”
In retrospect, it’s ironic that a robotics engineer working at the leading edge of technology had a greater respect for the distinctive competences of a human pilot than do the marketing gurus selling autonomous vehicles in 2025.
As fabulous as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology may be, it works as part of an operating system that requires a functional electricity grid. It will be interesting to see how this gets incorporated into the next round of product testing – and the press releases.
I hope California media does some follow-up news coverage of the stalled Waymos being towed; and that someone remembers to say “thank you” to the tow truck drivers.
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