In what might be the most embarrassing admission of Big Tech incompetence yet, Google's Waymo has quietly started hiring gig workers from DoorDash and other platforms to perform a task so basic it would make a kindergartner laugh: closing car doors.
That's right, folks. The same tech giants who lecture us about artificial intelligence replacing human workers can't figure out how to make their supposedly "revolutionary" robotaxis function when passengers forget to close a door. These multi-million-dollar vehicles literally sit there like expensive paperweights until a human shows up to perform this monumental task.
This isn't just a minor glitch – it's a perfect metaphor for everything wrong with Silicon Valley's arrogant promises about our automated future. While Waymo executives have been busy hyping their self-driving technology as the next great leap forward, their cars are getting defeated by the same mechanism we've been using since the Model T.
The Real Cost of 'Innovation'
Think about the economic absurdity here. Waymo is essentially running a fleet of vehicles that require human supervisors to handle basic mechanical functions. How is this any different from just hiring human drivers in the first place? Except now you've added multiple layers of complexity, cost, and failure points.
This door-closing debacle raises serious questions about the entire autonomous vehicle industry. If these companies can't solve something as simple as door management, what other critical safety issues are they glossing over in their rush to market?
Meanwhile, regular Americans are supposed to trust their lives to technology that can't even manage its own doors. The same tech companies pushing for massive government subsidies and regulatory changes to accommodate their "game-changing" innovations are secretly hiring minimum-wage workers to babysit their billion-dollar mistakes.
Maybe it's time for these Silicon Valley giants to focus on building technology that actually works instead of promising us a robot future that still needs humans to clean up after it. What's next – hiring people to plug in their electric vehicles when the robots can't figure out charging cables?