Newsletter | Finding Waymo

Self-driving cars have been the future for some time now. They have followed the Gartner Hype Cycle in predictable fashion, peaking several years back when we could extrapolate the progress to perfection and before a few highly publicized fatal accidents, after which their apparent lack of progress seemed to consign them to the realm of revolutions that weren’t. But, true to Gartner, they’ve been steadily working their way up the Slope of Enlightenment in the form of self-driving taxis in large cities. Noticing that they and their colleagues are already numb to the sight of driverless vehicles stopping to pick up passengers while most of the country had yet to even encounter such an event, a team of reporters at WIRED decided to help us reckon with a development that could have profound implications for cities and the ways in which we live our lives before it happens. As John Gravois, Paresh Dave, Meghan Herbst, Evelyn Kwong, Aarian Marshall, and Maria Streshinsky write in “Get in, Loser -- We're Chasing a Waymo Into the Future,” “The long-imagined future is finally, quietly, here, and all signs point to it taking over fast.” Given that, it seems like a good time to figure out what we want from this future.

photo by David Ingram

The article, which we highly recommend, takes a creative approach to understanding this future – they hire a cab driver to follow a Waymo self-driving taxi around San Francisco all day long, periodically accosting its passengers to learn about their experiences and motivations. Along the way, they discuss some of the potential implications and big unanswered questions of having fleets of autonomous vehicles wandering the streets, summoned on demand by riders, and periodically recharging and repositioning themselves for optimized coverage. There’s the question about safety – most analyses have shown that self-driving cars get into fewer accidents per mile driven than human-operated cars, although even WIRED’s cabbie argues that shifting away from cars to public transit and active modes like walking and biking would do more for safety. There are the debates about whether they would increase or decrease congestion, informed by the history of Uber and Lyft, which have generally increased congestion, questions about land use – could we dramatically reduce parking spaces? – and the underlying economics of transportation. From a health perspective, there are concerns about the potential impacts on the amount of physical activity and on social connection. Previous studies that emulate access to on-demand self-driving cars showed increases in both number of vehicle trips taken and miles driven. On the issue of social connection, the WIRED story has some unsettling clues. A number of the passengers express their delight at not having a human driver and a survey of junior bankers in San Francisco found that they were willing to trade off higher prices, longer wait times, and even longer walks to and from drop-off points just so that they could ride without a driver in the car with them. (This prioritization tracks with Derek Thompson’s excellent essay, highlighted below, “The Anti-Social Century.”)

The WIRED article quotes urban planning professor Adam Millard-Ball on the meaning of this moment: “The thing about the arrival of a big new technology—particularly when it needs approval to gain access to each new jurisdiction—is that it provides a natural opportunity for big policy discussions.” And that’s exactly what we need now. Derek Thompson, looking retrospectively at how we arrived at a time where we are all spending more and more time alone (with consequences to our health and to our society), identifies historical and structural roots. Says Thompson, “Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment.” The tragedy of that thinking is that – Adam Smith’s invisible hand be damned – 300+ million individuals making decisions for themselves as users or consumers does not magically scale into a positive societal outcome.

And that’s why the WIRED article is so important – it challenges us to step back and see that a big change is upon us and to think through its possible implications as citizens and not just consumers. We largely failed to do this in ridesharing – Uber’s strategy was to scale fast enough so that so many people had experienced it as consumers that they could win policy battles with cities and thus deploy the service in the service of its profits. Waymo is likely making the same bet. Pretty soon, enough people will have experienced the service that they’ll want it to be available, to meet their needs and wants as consumers, with less regard for how it shapes their communities and our society overall.

Neil Postman, in his prescient 1992 book Technopoly, identified the changing role of people in the emerging technology-based economy, starting in the 19th century:

“It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people were conceived of not as children of God or even citizens, but as consumers – that is to say, as markets.” 

We are expected to express ourselves by voting with our feet – by purchasing the goods and services that meet our needs and wants at the price points that work for us. By making personal economic choices that actually have public contexts and public implications. The (finally!) implemented congestion pricing policy in Manhattan has to a large degree been covered as a story of increased costs for automobile commuters and the approach itself – of imposing a fee on driving in the congestion relief zone – even invites us to compare costs of different options and make decisions on that basis (for example, one NYT article interviewed a driver who was weighing the $9 surcharge versus the change in parking garage fees if he parked outside of the zone instead of his usual garage within the zone). Less of the coverage focuses on the collective benefits to citizens of the region: reduced air and noise pollution, better safety for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians alike, and greater investments in public transportation.

The consumer mindset runs deep in our culture. It is almost so ingrained in us as to seem invisible. But to enable the application of technology and the services that it engenders to build a future that supports our health, we need to shake it off. There are scenarios in which self-driving cars are deployed in ways that could lead to better access to vital transportation, greater use of healthy modes of transportation, less air and noise pollution and greater safety. But they will not likely result if we leave the development and deployment to consumer choices about what services people need in the moment. Instead it will take political leadership and corporate leadership working together with an engaged citizenry. Above all, we have to agree upon the values we prioritize prior to wide-scale deployment rather than wait for the deployment to create those values within us.

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