A Los Angeles-based artificial intelligence (AI) expert experienced some alarming technological problems when his driverless Waymo ride to the airport nearly caused him to miss his flight after it began driving in circles.
Mike Johns, a “futurist” who specializes in “AI assistants that augment human tasks” and “human robot symbiotic relations” according to his website, got a bad taste of some of that similar technology in Scottsdale, Arizona last week when his autonomous taxi cab inexplicably malfunctioned.
A video he posted to social media from inside the Waymo car shows the steering wheel turning in circles without his manipulation and going around the parking lot instead of to the airport so he could make it back to LA:
“My Monday was fine till I got into one of Waymo’s ‘humanless’ cars,” Johns wrote on LinkedIn. “I get in, buckle up (safety first) and the saga begins. This autonomous vehicle said to heck with GPS, the car just went around in circles, eight circles at that.”
While the car was spinning in circles, Johns was desperately trying to get help from a customer service representative over the phone.
“It’s circling around a parking lot. I’ve got my seatbelt on, I can’t get out of the car. Has this been hacked? What’s going on?” Johns said in the video, complaining that he felt “dizzy.”
After several uncomfortable minutes of the tech entrepreneur being trapped in the backseat, the Waymo representative was finally able to get the car to pull over, “allowing him to get to the airport just in time to catch his flight back to LA,” CBS News reported.
However, Johns was not even sure if he was talking to a real human or an AI bot.
“Where’s the empathy? Where’s the human connection to this?” Johns told CBS. “It’s just, again, a case of today’s digital world. A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle.”
The driverless car company currently operates in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area 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 — especially women — complaining of facing harassment and other safety concerns while trying to ride to their destinations, Breitbart News reported.
In one shocking incident in San Francisco, a female 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 that had stopped for 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 get out of the way.
“I love Waymo but this was scary,” Amina wrote on X in September 2024. “2 men stopped in front of my car and demanded that I give my number. It left me stuck as the car was stalled in the street.”
“Thankfully, it only lasted a few minutes… Ladies please be aware of this,” she added.
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