Waymo: The Telenovela Renewed for 2026
February 9, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I am not planning to grab a ride in a fully autonomous, Silicon Valley Highway 101 doodle car. Sorry. Sitting in traffic heading from San Francisco to Palo Alto created the illusion that automating the creep along would be trivial. Yeah, the traffic in SF is terrible, and I can relate to a hyper kinetic super wizard thinking how much better it would be if a robot would do the creeping. The driver could become more productive than talking on his mobile to some contact in New York or checking email.
The idea has been around since I was caught in the commute from Berkeley to San Mateo every day for about three years. Never again. I am in rural Kentucky. No stupid one hour creeping for me. You wanna meet with me. Fire up Zoom. End of story.
But there is no end of the self driving, smart, autonomous car telanovela. Case in point: “Waymo Reveals Remote Workers in Philippines Help Guide Its Driverless Cars.” What a hoot. The Google pitches is quantumly supreme technology. It cannot after more than a decade of spending deploy a self driving vehicle without a human in the Philippines. Is the story accurate? I have no idea. But I have a hunch that it contains some truth. The Google self driving vehicle cannot be trusted to creep along without some type of non DeepMind human paying attention (one hopes).
The write up says:
During questioning, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked what happens when a Waymo vehicle encounters a driving situation it cannot independently resolve. “The Waymo phones a human friend for help,” Markey explained, adding that the vehicle communicates with a “remote assistance operator.”
Yep. The super smart company with its super smart software has to phone home to a human mom for help.
Markey criticized the lack of public information about these workers, despite their role in vehicle safety. Peña responded by clarifying the scope of the operators’ involvement: “They provide guidance, they do not remotely drive the vehicles,” Peña said.
What I found interesting was this snippet in the cited Newsweek article:
Waymo has not disclosed how many operators are based overseas versus in the U.S.
Several observations:
- Google operates according to a pattern: Do what it wants, output smarm, and moves forward
- The Google smart software capability is different from its marketing speak
- Autonomous is a bit like a magician who uses tricks to fool people.
Net net: Self-driving autonomous vehicles are a bit like AI: “Dream it, build it, people will fall for it.” Yep, it seems to be working in in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, Texas, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. Carry on, Googlers. You are doing it the Silicon Valley way. You are waymo better than I thought.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9. 2026
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