It’s bad karma to celebrate the misfortunes of others, so let’s just say that reading about Mike Johns’ horrific experience with one of Google’s driverless Waymo taxis should make clear to tech geeks there’s a deity even superior to Elon Musk.
Johns enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame after posting a video of a discombobulated Google Waymo taxi driving the Los Angeles resident in circles at a Phoenix area airport, nearly causing him to miss his flight back home.
“Why is this thing going in a circle? I’m getting dizzy,” Johns moaned in a video posted on social media that’s gone viral, garnering more than two million views and interactions.
Johns says that he was trapped inside of the car as it was “spinning like a teacup” at Disneyworld.
“It’s circling around a parking lot. I’ve got my seatbelt on, I can’t get out of the car. Has this been hacked? What’s going on?” Johns said in the video, complaining to a customer service agent that he felt “dizzy.”
It reportedly took Johns about five minutes to get a Waymo rep on the phone, and her response was exactly what I’d expect from a Google-owned company.
“I don’t have an option to control the car, I’m so sorry about that,” a woman’s voice can be heard on the phone.
Frankly, I’m surprised that Johns managed to possibly get a live person on the phone within five minutes. Although Waymo only offers limited service in the San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles regions, I still would have expected Johns to have heard a recording beginning, “Due to unusually heavy call volume,” and advising him that “answers to some of the most frequently asked Waymo passenger questions” could be found on the company’s website.”
Johns was quoted in the media railing that he wasn’t certain the customer service person he spoke with was even a real person.
“Where’s the empathy? Where’s the human connection to this?” Johns complained to the Los Angeles CBS affiliate. “It’s just, again, a case of today’s digital world. A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle.”
It’s comical that someone choosing to ride in a driverless taxi would be mourning the lack of a human connection. What’s even more hysterical is Johns’ line of work. According to his website, Johns is a “futurist” who specializes in “AI assistants that augment human tasks” and “human robot symbiotic relations.”
At last, I can put a face to one of the individuals responsible for chatbots and other AI digital tools responsible for the ubiquitous misery of American consumers. I blame these problem plagued “innovations” for the growing lack of civility in America, particularly on airplanes where every day I read at least one story about a flight being diverted because some hapless passenger became temporarily insane and took their inability to survive the prevailing commercial aviation experience out on a flight attendant or fellow passenger.
I’m certain I’m not the only person who’s told a chatbot to “go f**k yourself.” As Big Tech migrates humanity to more virtual interactions, it will become increasingly difficult to remember acceptable social behavior in public and the vulgar interactions that are tolerable online. In short order, many Americans won’t be able to distinguish between a flesh and blood flight attendant and an avatar.
Johns’ comment about Big Tech serving a “half baked” product and “nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle” is telling. Until U.S. customer service was overrun by the tech geek mindset, the operative maxim of U.S. businesses was, “the customer is always right.” There was no such thing as meeting customers in the middle — companies met consumers on their terms.
Johns wasn’t the AI executive to recently become victim of driverless technology. Jesse Lyu, who founded AI-powered hardware company Rabbit, posted a video to X last week about how he was left “literally shaking” when his self-driving Tesla veered onto light rail tracks in Santa Monica just as a train began barreling down on his EV. Lyu was forced to disengage Tesla’s Autopilot feature and run a red light to avoid the train’s path as it followed behind him.
Fortunately, Lyu didn’t collide with a car when it ran the red light.
Then there was the incident involving a driver named Paul S, who claimed his Tesla in full-self driving mode plowed into a deer standing in the middle of the road. Paul claimed his Tesla rammed directly into the deer, without stopping or slowing down even after hitting the deer on full speed.
I’m dumbfounded that people pay thousands of dollars for Tesla’s supposedly full-self driving mode but the company warns drivers must remain alert and fully engaged when using it. The whole point of full-self driving is to be afforded the luxury of avoiding the hassle of paying attention.
LiDAR vs Cameras
As I understand it, Waymo’s driverless technology is possibly superior to Tesla’s because the taxis are outfitted with a remote-sensing technology called LiDAR that uses laser beams to measure precise distances and movement in an environment, in real time. Musk opted to use cameras instead of sensors in his self-driving Teslas in part to reduce cost and the number of parts needed for each vehicle, Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former head of AI for its automated driving systems, stated in a 2022 interview.
Tesla loyalists disagree about the superiority of LiDAR and one would have to be mighty cynical to perceive Elon Musk as being capable of sacrificing safety and lives at the expense of furthering his great wealth. Indeed there’s evidence that even LiDAR technology has its limitations. GM’s driverless Cruise subsidiary, which CEO Mary Barra recently pulled the plug on, was forced to ground its vehicles after one of its cars hit and dragged a pedestrian, causing severe injuries.
According to chat logs and other materials obtained by The Intercept, Cruise vehicles struggled to detect large holes in the road where work by humans was being performed and had so much trouble recognizing children in certain situations there was a reasonable statistical probability they could hit them. A whistleblower warned regulators that Cruise’s technology wasn’t ready from prime time, yet Cruise was granted a license to expand its operations. Having your former managing counsel serve on a regulatory panel that licenses your business has its advantages.
Consumers like me who care about automotive safety should know that Cruise escaped meaningful punishment for its alleged recklessness. The Biden Justice Department allowed Cruise and its executives to avoid criminal prosecution and pay a measly $500,000 fine despite providing “a false record to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation of a crash involving one of Cruise’s autonomous vehicles.”
Barra, who was chair of Cruise’s board, reportedly is close with Biden and GM had considerable ties directly to the Biden White House.
Donald Trump has committed to loosening federal regulations for self-driving cars, so regulatory disregard for public safety will likely escalate, particularly as I predict Elon Musk will move to weaken or disband the NHTSA.
Free speech absolutist?
If Musk has his possible way, critics of Tesla will increasingly find themselves embroiled in litigation.
A group of Tesla shareholders has written to the company’s board asking that the company pursue legal action against media outlets that misrepresent Tesla news. The impetus was a story reporting that a Cybertruck explosion in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas had killed one person and injured seven. When the explosion was first reported, it wasn’t yet known the cause was terrorism.
It also appears likely that nattering nabobs of negativism about Tesla will find Elon Musk’s X a particularly unwelcoming place. Musk, who professed to be a “free speech absolutist,” disclosed last week that X will launch an “algorithm tweak” to temper rampant negativity on the site. The new algorithm will push more informational and entertaining content.
“Our goal is to maximize unregretted user-seconds,” Musk wrote in a post on X on Friday. “Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time.”
If Musk is looking for X to promote “good vibes” on his social media site, I know of an optimist in Washington who will be looking for a new job come January 20.