A Los Angeles-based artificial intelligence (AI) expert encountered alarming technology issues when his driverless Waymo ride to the airport almost caused him to miss his flight after it started going in circles.
Mike Johns, a “futurist” specializing in “AI assistants that augment human tasks” and “symbiotic human-robot relationships” according to his websitegot a bad taste of similar technology in Scottsdale, Arizona, last week when its self-driving taxi inexplicably malfunctioned.
A video he posted to social media from inside the Waymo car shows the steering wheel spinning in circles without his manipulation and circling the parking lot instead of going to the airport so he can return home. Los Angeles:
“My Monday was going great until I got into one of Waymo’s ‘human-free’ cars,” Johns wrote on LinkedIn. “I get in, I fasten my seat belt (safety first) and the saga begins. This autonomous vehicle said to hell with GPS, the car just went in circles, eight circles at that.
As the car spun in circles, Johns desperately tried to get help from a customer service representative over the phone.
“It’s going around a parking lot. I put on my seat belt, I can’t get out of the car. Was this hacked? What’s going on?” Johns said in the video, complaining of feeling “dizzy.”
After several uncomfortable minutes of the tech entrepreneur being stuck in the back seat, the Waymo representative finally managed to get the car to stop, “allowing him to arrive at the airport just in time to catch his flight home.” Los Angeles,” CBS News reported.
However, Johns wasn’t even sure if he was talking to a real human or an AI robot.
“Where is the empathy? Where is the human connection to all this? Johns told CBS. “This is yet another example of today’s digital world. A half-baked product and no one meets the customer, the consumers, in the middle.
The driverless car maker currently operates in the Phoenix-Scottsdale region of Arizona, as well as San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. Waymo is owned by Alphabet, the same parent company as Google.
The technology has received mixed reviews, with some passengers – particularly women – complain to face harassment and other security concerns as they tried to get to their destination, Breitbart News reported.
In a shocking incident in San Francisco, a Waymo passenger named Amina recorded two men blocking her vehicle’s path to demand her cell phone number, while the car was unable to maneuver around them:
“No…go, go, go!” Amina can be heard shouting at the men in her video, as they stood in front of her taxi which had stopped at a red light.
One of the men, wearing a hat and glasses, can be seen repeatedly making a “call me” gesture with his hand and refusing to move away.
“I love Waymo but it was scary,” Amina wrote on X in September 2024. “2 men stopped in front of my car and demanded I give my number. This left me stranded as the car was stuck in the street.
“Luckily it only lasted a few minutes… Ladies please be aware of that,” she added.
Breitbart News
