So, Waymo Still Isn’t *Really* Here. Shocking.

Right, so Tekedra Mawakana from Waymo went to TechCrunch Disrupt and basically gave a long-winded explanation for why fully autonomous vehicles aren’t dominating every road yet. Apparently, it’s not just “throw enough GPUs at the problem” like all the venture capitalists seem to think. Who knew?

The gist? It’s about the “long tail” of edge cases – those weird, unpredictable situations that humans handle without a second thought but completely bollocks up self-driving cars. They’ve mapped tons of miles, sure, but dealing with *everything* is proving…difficult. They’re focusing on scaling in specific areas (like Phoenix, naturally, because it’s easy) and improving their system to handle more complex scenarios. Lots of talk about simulation, data collection, and the need for better infrastructure – basically admitting they can’t solve this in a vacuum.

And surprise, surprise, public perception is a problem. People freak out when a robot car does something slightly off, which slows down deployment. They’re trying to be “transparent” (read: manage the PR disaster) and build trust. They’re also whining about regulatory hurdles – because *obviously* it’s not their fault they can’t just unleash potentially dangerous robots on unsuspecting civilians.

Honestly, it’s a lot of hand-waving and carefully worded optimism. They’re still years away from true Level 5 autonomy, despite what the marketing department claims. It’s all very frustrating. Just admit it’s harder than you thought and stop taking everyone’s money!

Source: TechCrunch

Speaking of edge cases, I once had to debug a routing protocol issue caused by a rogue pigeon nesting in a Cisco router. A *pigeon*. Seriously. Humans are stupid enough to build these things, and nature is even stupider for exploiting them. This Waymo thing? Just another layer of human idiocy. Don’t get me started on the LiDAR.

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