The Death of a Waymo

When propaganda of the deed comes for autonomous vehicles

Death Throes of a Waymo; Source: NBC News

I was recently asked to comment on the attacks carried out against Waymos in Los Angeles. For those not glued to the news cycle, protesters reacting to ICE raids lit several Waymos on fire, leaving them burned-out hulking wrecks.

As I pointed out to NBC’s David Ingram, autonomous vehicles are utterly defenseless in the face of human aggression. Everything about them is designed to ensure they can never, ever hurt a human being. For the record, this is good; but it does raise questions about how autonomous systems will handle situations where humans want to do them harm (and, more broadly, what steps the companies operating these systems will take to secure them in increasingly uncertain times).

killer robots humans

This recent spate of torchings isn’t a new phenomenon.¹ Back in February, a Waymo got got in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the Lunar New Year festivities. The vehicle, once surrounded and stopped, was spray painted and set on fire (apparently fireworks thrown through a broken window is enough to get the job done).

Looking at the r/Waymo subreddit after the incident, AV enthusiasts immediately proposed a laundry list of ideas for protecting the vehicles. And it’s all the stuff I’d expect: rapid response police units, private security, and vehicle mounted counter measures.

All of those are terrible ideas (likely why Waymo hasn’t tried any of them). Trying to solve the problem at the point of someone standing in front of a car with a molotov in hand is a losing proposition.

As the protests were taking off, Waymo did the sensible thing and just tried to keep their AVs out of harm’s way. Service was cut off to specific parts of Los Angeles as well as San Francisco. Passengers in SF immediately noticed this as it created some unusually circuitous routes.

Creating no/go zones is a stopgap, though. Excising whole chunks of your service area literally reduces the size of your market. More subtly, though, it complicates the question of which car to assign to which pickup (and forces inefficient routing to boot). Beyond that, the likelihood of a Waymo getting set on fire isn’t a statistical property of a given neighborhood. If someone really wants to light a one on fire, they can just go to the other side of your arbitrary line. And that, perhaps, gets to the root of Waymo’s particular problem.

Blowback

The Waymos that gave their final rides on the streets of Los Angeles a couple weeks ago weren't just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By virtue of how Waymos work, they’re basically mobile panopticons. All of the data they record about the built environment is useful for law enforcement and many folks take issue with the fact that the company provides this data to officials upon request. From the perspective of folks marching against ICE, the company is collaborationist.

Surveillance of public spaces isn’t a new concern. We recently covered a related story in New Orleans where NOPD officers were making use of an officially unsanctioned network of security cameras feeding data into a real-time facial recognition system. Less dramatically, police across the country have been making use of footage from Ring cameras attached to people’s front doors for years now.

New Orleanian Panopticon

Waymos are different from security cameras, though. They’re mobile, they capture far more data about the environment around them, and, most importantly, they’re obvious. A driverless car is more attention-grabbing than a camera tucked away under an awning. Their destruction is also a much more potent symbol for folks with the relevant political disposition.² On top of that, the absence of a human driver significantly lowers the psychological barrier to violence relative to a human-operated vehicle. For baseline human beings, it’s much easier to attack something when we don’t see it as human.³

So people want to torch Waymos and that has to do with the company’s relationship with the political moment, the nature of the service, and the way the product functions. What’s an autonomous vehicle transportation network to do?

Hope y’all didn’t come here today for answers

Since the protests, Waymo has restored service in the areas they’d cordoned off. They’ve also gone ahead with market expansions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and parts of the peninsula. So, my best guess is that the company has a rapid response team ready to draw lines on a map and divert their cars away from danger at a moment’s notice.⁴

I’m sure their PR folks have also been tasked with distancing the product from people that want to deport your neighbor’s abuela who’s lived in the U.S. for 30 years and fed you pupusas that one time.

And, in the background, I have to also imagine they’re working with law enforcement to identify and prosecute any individuals they can identify. (Although, it’s possible aggressive prosecution could result in a sort of Streisand Effect)

And that’s probably about as much as they can do. If civil unrest continues apace — and given current events I’m betting that it will — there’ll still be demand to destroy anything that’s practically or symbolically linked with the administration. My totally not serious (unless it turns out to be correct) best guess is that the widespread rollout of Tesla robotaxis would go a long way toward shifting ire away from Waymo. Tesla remains synonymous with Elon and, even after his expulsion from the President’s inner circle, the man remains closely associated with the administration and its politics. That all assumes Tesla’s LIDAR-less cars actually function well enough for regulators to allow them to stay on the road (a bet I’m currently not willing to take).

1. In fact, humans attacking robots in general isn’t even new. In 2015, a robot (Hitchbot) attempting to hitchhike from Boston to San Francisco met a grisly end in Philadelphia where it was dispatched by unknown assailants. Though its remains were later recovered, its head has never been found. Some (me) even speculate the method of execution was the infamous philly-style open hand slap (a staple technique found in martial systems indigenous to the region).

2. There’s probably a range of motivations that lead one to immolate a robot car. On one end, there’s the idea of directly connecting the super rich Waymo data set to enabling ICE raids; on the other, destroying a Waymo may have vaguer associations with being anti-capitalist, whatever that actually means.

3. Infamously, this is also how genocides work.

4. I’m sure an ops playbook of some kind already existed, but in my experience these things get fleshed out (and fully instituted) after the first event wherein you really needed it.