Multiple Intersections Blocked for Hours – Another Black Eye for Google –
Tales From the MoJo Road
By Glynn Wilson –
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Nothing says Silicon Valley like Google’s Waymo robotaxis, the newest, greatest form of transportation invented since the electric streetcar in 1892, the year my grandmother was born. It served as a more traditional icon of the great city on the West Coast featured in stories since the days of Mark Twain and movies and television since.
It’s still not clear to me why anyone would even bother to dream up a driverless car. Driving is all the fun. Not riding. It’s not a boat. Only a college dropout tech nerd could come up with such a hairbrained idea in the first place, then get a bunch of Wall Street suits to fund it. What a world.
I suspect Twain would have shared my giggle at Google the other day when Waymo taxis stalled and died in the streets during a power blackout coming up on the Christmas holiday, blocking multiple intersections for hours. The unprepared company’s ad hoc response to the disaster was to quickly hire people for $22 to find the little white cars all over the city and manually open the doors, to finally let the people trapped inside for hours out.
What happened to the battery-powered GPS satellite signal? The cellphone tower WiFi?
No one’s asking or answering, according to what I’ve seen, not even the A.I. bots now training to take over the city, county, state and country.
It’s like a line uttered by a Hollywood agent in Bill Murray’s “A Very Murray Christmas.”
“Total disaster. A total disaster Bill. This is a Murraycane.”
No one was hurt. So it’s funny. Especially if you already suspect and don’t like Google.
Read the full story in the New American Journal.