IT’S NOT ABOUT THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: What Full Autonomy Means for the Waymo Driver. “While humans may not be directly in the loop with Waymo’s vehicles, there’s a team of them on remote standby to provide high-level guidance if a vehicle finds itself in a novel or ambiguous situation that it isn’t confident about handling on its own. These situations won’t require a human to take over the operation of the vehicle, but they can include things like construction zones, unexpected road closures, or a police officer directing traffic with hand signals— situations a human might be able to interpret at a glance, but that autonomous systems notoriously find difficult. There’s nothing wrong with the approach of having humans available like this, except that it raises the question of whether a Level 4 autonomous system should really be called fully autonomous and fully independent from a human driver if it sometimes finds itself in situations where it may decide to ask a remote human for guidance.”