The number of stalled Google Murderbots is a valuable trade secret:

That information is a trade secret, Waymo’s attorney Jack Stoddard told Senior Administrative Law Judge Robert Mason, drawing snickers from a crowd. […]

Mason’s jaw appeared to tighten, and he trained his eyes on Stoddard, as though to express disbelief.

“Counsel, is it your position that the number of vehicles that stopped as a result of the Dec. 2025 power failure is confidential?” he asked. When the attorney stood his ground, saying his client couldn’t risk exposing too much detail about its fleet deployment, the judge did not appear satisfied.

“Well, you may have claimed a trade secret, but the commission has not ruled on that yet,” Mason said. […]

For hours, Waymos had become paralyzed in intersections as the vehicles asked for confirmation from human supervisors to treat the outed traffic lights as four-way stops. That spike in confirmation requests overwhelmed the technology company, ultimately forcing it to suspend service.

As a result, Waymo will refine its approach to darkened traffic lights, making its self-driving cars more decisive and “less reliant on feedback from remote assistants,” Stoddard said Friday.

So that last bit is confirmation of what many people were theorizing:

When Waymos encounter anything even slightly difficult, they shut down, and wait for a remote operator to log on from a call center in Indonesia.During the PG&E blackout, the call center was understaffed for the number of robots that had shut themselves down.Rather than having the remote drivers just pull the cars over and park them until they had enough staffing to deal with this shitshow, they just… didn’t. Google sat with their thumbs up their asses for six hours instead.The solution they are proposing above? Rather than trying to “fail safe” and call in a human Mechanical Turk operator to manually pilot the drone, they’re just going to let the robot Leeroy Jenkins it. This is absolutely going to get people killed.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

From jwz via this RSS feed