As far as I can tell here the ghost portion is basically a non-sequiter. The waymo vehicle called the cops because it detected e passengers had a gun. The vehicle did not know or care about its status as a ghost gun or not. I'm sure that the Waymo terms of service prohibit carrying weapons into the vehicle. I'm pretty sure that if you were brandishing a realistic looking enough gun, an Uber driver would kick you out and call the cops as well.

I'm really torn on this.

This particular situation, at face value at least, sounds like a good outcome. Kids had a gun, someone noticed, called police, situation handled without escalation or violence or something tragic happening.

But this doesn't generalize. Another incident described in the article was when some kids were drinking in the car and shooting toy guns. What if they hadn't been drinking? What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy.

The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine. (I recall a recent incident where someone was wrongfully arrested because one of the companies that run the license-plate reader machines flagged their car as stolen. The machine screwed up the image recognition, but the cops blindly trusted it and arrested the guy.)

What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always-on surveillance, and this will only get worse as autonomous vehicles become more popular in the taxi scene.

Shocking this isn't bigger news. It will be strange what they get you for. Maybe car ownership isn't doomed after all.

At least a human usually has some judgment and discretion situationally.

I guess the alternative "Juvenile Driveby Shooting takes place from Waymo" isn't a better headline though.

Flock is bad, but fleets of cars strapped to the teeth with cameras and sensors are suddenly ok even when they call the police on you? Why? Because of the makers of the technology that powers the cars say they are safer (via datasets that we have no way to validate)?

> The company pulled the car over after detecting a “violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,"

Well now my biggest fear of riding a Waymo is not how it drives but getting my Google account banned because it misdetected something.

I dunno. This doesn’t bother me in the same way that flock cameras do. A Waymo car is a private space that you don’t have to use if you don’t want to. Seems pretty reasonable to me that Waymo doesn’t want their cars used for drive by shootings. If a drive by were to happen in a Waymo, this would be compelled by law anyway.

It is incredibly weird to me that people are conflicted or even negative about this. An automated system prevented some troublemakers with a firearm from possibly causing serious injury or death, and we're throwing out things like "but what if?" "yeah but flock!". And then when there's a tragic shooting, "No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens".

I think this is awesome and I want more autonomous cars on the streets, replacing bad human drivers and calling the cops on kids with guns.