Woman Arrested in Driverless Waymo Taxi for Whistling Men

It’s one of the most classic lines from “Jurassic Park”: “Your scientists were so worried about whether they could or not, that they didn’t stop to think about whether they should.”

That seems to be the case with more and more technological advances these days, and a San Francisco woman’s recent experience with Waymo, Google’s self-driving taxi company, is a perfect example.

Her terrifying encounter with sexist men who managed to disable her vehicle is just the latest in a series of incidents that have revealed the limitations of the Google product and the dangers it can pose to customers.

The woman was trapped in her Waymo taxi, shouting at men to get her number.

Amina is a social media user and technology worker whose area of ​​expertise — “Human-Computer Interaction and Growth Engineering,” according to her bio X — is directly related to the harrowing experience she recently had on a Waymo, the taxis standalones developed by Google. which currently roam the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin.

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In a post on X, Amina shared what happened to her during a recent Waymo trip. She was trapped in the car because a group of whistling men insisted she give them her phone number.

In her posts, she emphasized that she loves the Waymo system and service and will likely continue to use it despite the incident. But it gave even a tech professional like her pause and left many others online terrified at what could easily have turned into a truly dire situation.

Waymo uses AI-based software to determine your movements. When the men blocked the taxi’s path, it appeared to have disabled itself.

According to Waymo, its cars use a combination of incredibly detailed maps, “real-time data” from the cars’ litany of sensors, and “artificial intelligence (AI)” to find their way around, navigate city streets, and, most importantly, decide your moves.

This combination of sensors and AI is how autonomous vehicles, for example, decide to stop instead of hitting a person on the street. So when a group of sexist men approached Amina’s Waymo, it did exactly what it was designed to do: it stopped and refused to move until the men got out of the way.

This resulted, as her video shows, in Amina essentially being trapped – her choices were to stay inside the disabled car or get out and confront the men chasing her, which appears to have left her terrified as she was heard shouting at the men. to move.

She told The San Francisco Standard that she was “scared” about the encounter because she “didn’t know what (the men) were going to do.” She also said in her X thread that another man was nearby wielding a blowtorch.”

Even after the men got out of the way, the car remained stopped in the middle of the street, probably because it was “confused” by the situation and disabled itself for safety. A message appeared on the screen notifying Amina that the Waymo “team” was working to “get you moving” again.

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Waymo’s self-driving taxis have been involved in several equally horrific incidents.

Speaking to The San Francisco Chronicle, Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina highlighted that incidents like Amina’s are “extremely rare”. Amina says she is pleased with Waymo’s response to the incident and will likely continue using the service.

Still, hers is just one of several high-profile incidents involving the company’s taxis. Just days before Amina, a group of women posted images of their exhilarating encounter with vandals who stopped their Waymo by sabotaging its sensors and began defacing it with spray paint while throwing objects at the glass. A similar incident went viral earlier this year.

In May, Waymo was the subject of a federal investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after multiple reports of self-driving taxis violating traffic rules and getting into accidents. A June accident in Phoenix, in which one of the robotaxis struck a pole during a routine pullover maneuver, also resulted in a recall of Waymo’s software.

Still, Waymo’s accident rates are extremely small compared to regular human-driven cars. But it’s not easy to shake the central fact of Amina’s and others’ experiences – they were essentially made possible by car technology. Without sensors to block, the car would not have been disabled. It’s unlikely that a driver behind the wheel would simply sit there and let screamers or vandals threaten their vehicle. Amina’s situation, in fact, could easily have been much worse.

Driver-led services like Uber and Lyft present their own dangers. But as the list of problems with Waymo and the autonomous features aboard Tesla vehicles continues to grow, it’s hard not to feel like this technology just isn’t ready for prime time — and is using real, live humans as guinea pigs to get there.

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John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer covering pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.