Robot taxi riders in San Francisco targeted with a new form of harassment
As Alphabet’s Waymo scales up its self-driving service, some riders recount feeling like sitting ducks when strangers interfere with their robot chauffeur.
Stephanie recalled riding home with her sister in one of Waymo’s driverless Jaguar SUVs around 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night when a car holding several young men began following them. They drove close to the robotaxi honking and yelling, “Hey, ladies — you guys are hot.”
If she or another human had been driving, it would have been easy to reroute the car to avoid leading the pursuers to her home. But she was scared and didn’t know how to change the robot’s path. She called 911, but a dispatcher said they couldn’t send a police car to a moving vehicle, Stephanie recalled.
“All the safety things then become unsafe if someone is following you,” she said of the incident, which Waymo confirmed and has not been previously reported.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/22/waymo-robotaxi-passengers-harassment/
Why Is It So Hard to Make a Robot Chef?
Restaurants are experimenting with automation. But in the kitchen, human labor is hard to replace.
Unlike car factories or Amazon warehouses, which rely on robots to perform repeatable actions, restaurant kitchens run on multitasking. Flipping pancakes requires a different system from one that dispenses coffee or makes spaghetti. Moreover, producing potentially sticky, gooey or cheesy foods means robots need to be easy to clean to maintain food-safety standards.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/business/restaurant-robots.html