Driving all happens locally in the onboard computer on the Waymo. The car does maintain internet connectivity - but generally it's used for non-driving scenarios. (traffic info, next pickup drop off, entertainment systems, etc)

There are cases where the onboard computer can't make a decision or needs "help" - in which case a support specialist is presented with options the onboard computer needs help deciding between. To be clear - the human is not driving it's more the car asks "Hey - there's something ahead and I am unsure if it's safe to proceed. Here's a video clip of the thing I'm seeing. Help?" Common cases might be an out of distribution thing like steam or an unidentifiable object in the road.

In a "worst case" mode - a human can remotely give the onboard computer a directed path to follow - eg "draw points and follow this path" to get back to where it needs to be. Even then - the onboard computer is following the path but still maintaining it's constraints "eg don't hit pedestrians."

You can read more about this here: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response

That sounds good. Thank you.

Driving the speed limit is a feature not a bug - and crucially all of the Uber drivers I've had in SF drive terribly. It's like I'm in Mario Kart.

We should be excited about not having humans drive and automating them out of this task they clearly don't want to do.

I've interviewed with / been to the facility of this place: https://science.xyz/products/vision/

They're exploring the "digital eye" concept you mentioned. Really cool stuff. Probably less than 50 years for the fixing some types of blindness.

Really cool. Glad to see someone is already working on this.