The obvious question is, why does this work in Phoenix?
Where I live, road conditions are changing all the time. There’s new construction, new roads opening, temporary (a few hours at a B time) changes in lanes where you have to drive against the normal direction of traffic.
You can call it moving goal posts, but to deploy them generally, they either have to have general intelligence, or you need to input construction schedules, so that it won’t take certain roads during certain times. And then what? You can’t order a ride to certain locations?
Waymo has been dealing with construction since day one. If the road is entirely blocked, Google Maps/Waze is already capable of changing routes on the fly.
There will always be corner cases that automation can't deal with, but Waymo will have some human troubleshooters around for that. So do us humans, for that matter: when a car breaks down, most people call the mechanic instead of applying their own general intelligence to fixing it.
Eg A road is accessible from 5am to 8pm. Outside those times traffic conditions change. Humans setup cones and control the flow of traffic. 2 lanes becomes 1 lane for all traffic. And traffic is managed so that depending on what direction you’re going, your driving against the normal flow of traffic.
This is a real scenario in a moderately busy area. Times may be wrong. The road is not blocked. But you have to take direction from a person. In fact this sort of temporary traffic change is fairly common especially due to road works.
Where I live, road conditions are changing all the time. There’s new construction, new roads opening, temporary (a few hours at a B time) changes in lanes where you have to drive against the normal direction of traffic.
You can call it moving goal posts, but to deploy them generally, they either have to have general intelligence, or you need to input construction schedules, so that it won’t take certain roads during certain times. And then what? You can’t order a ride to certain locations?