What’s Lost When the Human Drivers Are Gone?

If you’ve spent time in San Francisco or Phoenix in the past couple years, chances are you’ve probably seen a self-driving car making its way around. This week, we’re joined by WIRED’s Aarian Marshall to talk about the race to flood our streets with self-driving cars. We’ll get into safety regulations, the pros and cons of robotaxis, and we imagine a future where driverless cars become mainstream.

You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Aarian Marshall on Bluesky at @aarianmarshall. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Lauren, would you like to introduce our guest?

Lauren Goode: Oh! I thought we were going to do the old “Lauren, Mike.” I would be happy to introduce our guest. So Zoë is not here today, but she’s around. She’s very busy, and we are very excited to welcome in her place Aarian Marshall. Aarian is a staff writer at WIRED covering all things transportation. There’s a lot going on in transportation these days. Aarian, it’s great to have you here.

Aarian Marshall: It’s great to be here.

Michael Calore: Why didn’t you fly on an airplane out to San Francisco to join us?

Aarian Marshall: I didn’t fly on an airplane out to San Francisco to join you because that’s not in Condé Nast’s budget right now.

Lauren Goode: Do you live in New York now?

Aarian Marshall: No, I’m just here for a few months.

Michael Calore: Do they have Waymos in New York City?

Aarian Marshall: They do not have Waymos or any sort of self-driving cars. I think New York City is kind of the final boss of self-driving cars, and we are far away from the final boss. Maybe one day.

Michael Calore: Well, that’s our topic this week. That’s why we’re bringing you on, because you do a lot of the reporting, as Lauren mentioned, about all the different self-driving cars, robotaxis, driverless vehicles, autonomous vehicles.

Lauren Goode: Planes, trains, automobiles, ebikes, everything with wheels.

Michael Calore: Well, we’re so excited to have you here today, Aarian, because we’re going to talk about the race to flood our streets with self-driving cars. We’ll consider the pros and cons of sharing the road with these robotaxis and talk about how companies are dealing with all of those pesky safety regulations. We’ll also examine what the endgame is for tech companies building self-driving cars, and we’ll imagine what the future will look like once driverless cars become fully mainstream. This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. I’m Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture here at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.

Aarian Marshall: And I’m Aarian Marshall. I’m a staff writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: So let’s put some names on the board to start out with.

Lauren Goode: Cybertruck.

Michael Calore: Hopefully we won’t be talking about the Cybertruck a whole lot this week.

Lauren Goode: Third show in a row, I think, so let’s skip that one.

Michael Calore: We have to keep bringing it up, but who are the big players in self-driving cars? When we’re talking about autonomous vehicles, there are very big names. Who are those names and what are they up to?

Aarian Marshall: So I’d say the biggest name in self-driving cars is Waymo. That is Google’s sister company. In fact, it used to be the Google self-driving car project. I think everyone knows that Waymo is in the lead right now in self-driving cars. They operate paid taxi services, paid driverless taxi services in Phoenix, in San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and just this month, Austin, Texas, in conjunction with Uber right now. You can actually get on Uber in Austin and try to order yourself a self-driving car, which is a big deal.

Lauren Goode: That’s timed to South by Southwest presumably?

Michael Calore: Probably.

Aarian Marshall: Exactly. Soon they will be operating in Atlanta and then next year Miami. So they have a lot of cities that they’re operating in.

Michael Calore: Lauren, the first Waymo ride I ever had was with you.

Lauren Goode: Was it on my birthday?

Michael Calore: Yeah. Affirmative.

Lauren Goode: Oh really? That was your first one?

Michael Calore: That was the first time I ever rode in one.

Lauren Goode: That was super fun, and we took it all the way to Cow Hollow or something. We took it over the hills, so we really had the experience of feeling it careen over these hills in San Francisco and just putting our lives in its hands.

Michael Calore: We did. They are absolutely everywhere here. If you don’t live in San Francisco or you don’t visit the Bay Area often, you should know that there are tons of Waymos on the street. You’ll get here, you’ll see one, you’re like, “Hey look, there’s nobody behind the wheel of that car, and it’s going down the road at 30 miles an hour.” And you’ll pull out your phone and you’ll take a picture of it or shoot a video to show your friends, and then within the next five minutes you’ll see another 10 of them.

Lauren Goode: And you’ll see them driving side by side on the road and stuff. It’s almost like a Tesla Model 3 at this point.

Michael Calore: Yes, but there are certain parts of the city that they don’t go in; they don’t go on the freeways yet.

Lauren Goode: Do they go to the airport? Aarian you might know. Do they go to San Francisco Airport?

Aarian Marshall: They don’t go to San Francisco Airport yet. They are testing on the highways, and they actually have permission from the state to operate paid services on the highways, but they don’t do it quite yet.

Michael Calore: Aarian, what has your experience with Waymos been?

Aarian Marshall: Funny thing about me is that WIRED first hired me to cover self-driving cars because I didn’t have a driver’s license until very recently, and they thought it would be adorable if they had someone who couldn’t drive write about self-driving cars. It was probably a bad idea, but here I am. So my first experience with the self-driving car was back in 2017 when I was in a Cruise, and it was a real scaredy-cat—it would break hard whenever it saw someone on the sidewalk who maybe looked like they might cross the street even if it was in the middle of the street, not in a crosswalk. So it was kind of an unpleasant experience, and I remember feeling a little ill. Since then, I’ve taken a lot of really impressive rides in Waymos and Cruises all over the country. I think most recently I took a ride in Arizona. That was great except for one interesting experience where we were driving next to a dog park, and a dog was running full tilt after a ball towards the fence of the dog park, and clearly the car didn’t realize that there was a fence for this dog park, so it braked really, really hard. If there was someone behind us, we probably would’ve gotten rear-ended, because it doesn’t have that kind of human intelligence to be able to say, “Oh, that dog is in a dog park. They’re not going to run ahead of me because there’s a fence in the way and they’re not going to scale the fence somehow to get their ball.” So that was an interesting experience I had, but in general they’ve been very pleasant, and I do recommend it.

Michael Calore: Waymo, love them or don’t, but they’re everywhere. Who else should we be talking about?

Aarian Marshall: So there are a few more players. We have Zoox, which is actually owned by Amazon. They have been testing for a while in San Francisco, in Foster City, on the peninsula. They’re testing in Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, Miami. They say they’re actually going to launch a paid service finally in Las Vegas later this year. And this is in a purpose-built, little mint-green toaster-looking thing. It really looks very different from any other car on the road, whereas Waymos are operating in real cars that actually do have steering wheels. The Zoox looks like nothing you’ve ever seen on the road, so that’ll be cool when that happens. And then the other big player I’d say is Tesla, and this is kind of the big question mark with self-driving. Tesla has their advanced driver assistance feature called Full Self-Driving, and they’ve had that for a while now. Now, Full Self-Driving doesn’t actually self-drive. It just helps people navigate in certain situations, and they always say, “Despite the branding, you have to keep your eyes on the road.” Now Elon Musk has promised that soon that will not be the case, and they are saying that in June they’re going to launch a totally self-driving robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and then they’re also going to do that in California at some point this year. I’d say some people are skeptical about that timeline, but that’s what Elon has said is going to happen.

Lauren Goode: I’m going to ask a question that might be kind of dumb, but why do these self-driving vehicles roll out in major cities first? Why are they not in the suburbs?

Aarian Marshall: That is not a dumb question at all. This was actually a big controversy in self-driving cars when they first started operating as robotaxis. There’s a company that kind of doesn’t exist any more called Cruise, which was acquired by General Motors, and they were operating robotaxi services. They started out in San Francisco, and their theory was, we want to start out where we know a lot of people take Ubers. There’s a high demand for taxi services where there’s a lot of people and a lot of density, and we want to try the hardest thing first. We want to make sure that we can deal with the craziness of San Francisco. Waymo had a different strategy at first, they launched in Phoenix, Arizona, and in metro Phoenix, Arizona. So it’s a bit more suburban there, and they decided that they wanted to kind of do slightly easier things first where there are clear road signs. I think at this point it’s become clear that the best business case for robotaxis is going to where the most people need taxis and where people need taxis all the time, and that’s in cities.

Michael Calore: Aarian, these companies are using different technologies to find their way around the cityscape. Can you tell us a little bit about how they differ and how they’re similar?

Aarian Marshall: I feel like there’s kind of two big schools of thought, and it’s Tesla versus everyone else. Generally self-driving cars work by placing a ton of sensors on cars and using those sensors which include cameras, radar, and lidar to have the car understand where it is in space. And then in addition, most self-driving car companies create these very detailed high-definition maps of the places they’re going to operate. So the car also has these maps to help them get around. Now, Tesla doesn’t think they need that. They haven’t done the intensive mapping that we’ve seen from other companies, and their big differentiator is they don’t think they need lidar. They think that they can create self-driving cars mostly on a totally camera-based system. They really like this idea because it’s cheaper. Lidar has actually come down a lot in price over the past decade or so, but it’s still kind of expensive. So to put it all over every car, especially for Tesla, their vision is that every Tesla on the road right now can eventually become a self-driving car. So if they were to sell every Tesla right now with lidar, that would be really a lot of expense for them. So they think they can do it with just cameras.

Lauren Goode: How much does a single Waymo car cost, which is a Jaguar, right?

Aarian Marshall: We don’t have a firm answer on this from Waymo. This is not something they talk about publicly. We do have an analysis from a bank called Citizens JMP, which did some number crunching last year and they assumed that Waymo, it costs about $70,000 in hardware and then $41,000 a year to operate. And they said based on those figures, Waymo would generate about $112,000 in annual revenue per car in San Francisco specifically. And again, that’s based on the Jaguar as you said. Waymo also has their own little, purpose built robotaxi coming out. They’re actually testing it in San Francisco right now from a Chinese company called Zeekr, so that might change the numbers a bit. Again, this is very back-the-envelope math, but this is what we have so far.

Lauren Goode: That’s surprising. I wouldn’t think they’re making money.

Michael Calore: Well, they cost $30 to take a trip sometimes.

Lauren Goode: But you don’t have to tip.

Aarian Marshall: Now I will say pretty robust revenue on a per-car unit basis. Does that factor in what they’re paying to have people at a call center answering phones related to Waymo or infrastructure or the lobbying they have to do to influence regulations in different cities or states on a federal level? We’re not sure about that either, so we’re not sure what the total math is, but it’s interesting that they do say it’s making pretty robust revenue on a per-car unit basis.

Michael Calore: Well, thanks for that overview. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll come right back. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Let’s talk about how it’s been going out on the roads. What has the reception been like? I think we should start with passengers. Do people like robotaxis? Do they like riding in them? Are they riding in them? Do they like sharing the roads with them if they’re driving a car next to one?

Aarian Marshall: WIRED actually did some fun reporting on this over the summer where we chased a few robotaxis with this very ornery, talkative Uber driver. It was a crazy day and we ended up talking to a lot of people as they were getting in and out of Waymos, which we thought was kind of the best way for us to organically find Waymo passengers.

Lauren Goode: So just to be clear, the group of WIRED reporters hopped in a regular car that was driven by an Uber driver. He was driving the group around as you chased a Waymo.

Aarian Marshall: Correct. Yes. There was also a supplementary chase car. The logistics were, we had someone at HQ watching everyone on maps. It was really an amazing operation, but when we talked to the people who were coming in and out of cars, people tended to love them. So I’d say one dynamic that was interesting is that in San Francisco at least it seemed like it was a lot of tourists. So people who would do a trip to San Francisco and they would show up and be like, “Oh my God, I didn’t know there were so many of these things around.” And then we talked to some people who just take them as part of their everyday lives. So we talked to a woman who was going to get her nails done. The big theme was that people were like, “I love that I’m alone and I don’t have to talk to a driver and I don’t have to have some sort of awkward interactions that make me a little bit uncomfortable with a driver.” And as someone who kind of worries about how technology is changing our relationships with other people, I’ve spent some time thinking about whether that’s good and it makes me feel a little bit yucky. I think a lot of people and women in particular have had some really bad experiences with taxi drivers, so I understand that kind of feeling of relief that you don’t have to worry about that. At the same time, I’ve had a lot of sort of lovely serendipitous conversations with taxi drivers and Uber drivers, and I would be sad to exist in a world where that doesn’t happen, which is all to say, people love it. People love being alone in their own little tube on the road. So that’s kind of interesting.

Lauren Goode: There have been some incidents of vandalism and I happen to have seen people kind of act out around them. I once saw a person who was carrying a jacket walking up the street and the Waymo was driving slowly by them to turn a corner and the person just whipped their jacket at the Waymo, which obviously did nothing, but they were expressing some kind of displeasure about this robot overtaking their street.

Michael Calore: Trying to hurt it. And the stuff that I’ve seen as a passenger and just on the roads has mostly been sort of civil disobedience, people jumping out in front of a Waymo because if you do that it stops and then they look at you. I was sitting in the car and in the back seat somebody jumped out and was looking at me and making faces at me and wagging their finger and just being silly, but trying to express to me their displeasure that I had chosen this as my mode of transportation. And then of course there were safe streets activists who were doing this really fun thing where they would put a traffic cone on the hood of a self-driving car because in the early days before the company figured out that people were doing this, you could do that and it would just confuse the car and it would stop.

Lauren Goode: It would just stop.

Michael Calore: It would think that it had something on its hood and it would be like, “Oh, I can’t move now.”

Lauren Goode: They’re so smart until they’re not.

Aarian Marshall: Mike, you probably know this better than any of us, but I’ve heard from a lot of bicycle commuters in particular who love driving next to Waymos because they drive in a predictable way. They’re very polite to bicycles. They’re never going to pull down their window and spit at them or curse at them, which is something that human drivers do to bike riders sometimes. That said, there have been times when masses of people have attacked Waymos. There was one incident in Chinatown where a crowd set one on fire, so there’s definitely been backlashes in cities for sure, and I would honestly expect that to continue because it is really disconcerting to some people and they can be a little pokey. Drivers can be frustrated with them because sometimes they’re not as aggressive with yellow lights and stuff like that, and there have been situations where Waymos and cruises when they were operating really just froze in the middle of the streets, and this is something that still happens. Sometimes they just freeze and that can be disturbing when you’re in traffic and suddenly the car in front of you just isn’t moving and there’s kind of nothing you can do about it because it’s driven by a robot and not by a human.

Michael Calore: You can honk and people do honk and-

Lauren Goode: Nothing happens.

Michael Calore: Endlessly amusing.

Lauren Goode: Because there’s nobody there, there’s no driver to respond to that. In some ways, Waymos are like the Starbucks of electric vehicles because you get in one and you always know what you’re going to get. Every car smells the same and it drives pretty much exactly the same, and there’s a sort of, I don’t know, almost like a diluted experience to it. When I think of Starbucks, I don’t think… And by the way, I drink Starbucks, it’s great, but I don’t think of it as a place necessarily to commune. You’re not necessarily there for the human-to-human interaction. You’re there to get in and get out. That’s kind of what getting into a Waymo feels like relative to getting into a taxi.

Michael Calore: Or a bus for that matter.

Lauren Goode: Right, or a bus or train.

Michael Calore: I’m curious how city governments have been responding. Are cities welcoming when self-driving cars want to come operate in their town? Are they pushing back? Are they setting special rules?

Aarian Marshall: So it really depends on the city. Something that the autonomous vehicle industry has been complaining about for years and years is that this country is really a patchwork of regulations for self-driving cars and they differ not only state by state, but by city. Some states have preempted cities in terms of regulations, so I think of Texas for example, which is kind of like a hotbed of autonomous vehicle action right now. And part of that reason is because the cities don’t have the power to say no. And Texas has basically said, “If you want to come operate a self-driving car service here, go ahead. We think it’s great.” And that can be really disturbing to not only city governments, but city residents who say, “Hey, this is happening on my road that I live on with my children and my family. I would like some input into when and where these things operate.” California, for example, also has rested power away from its cities, so San Francisco in particular doesn’t actually have any power over the Waymos and Zooxes that operate there, but California has a very robust and multistep rollout process for self-driving cars. They publish a fair amount of public data on how those self-driving cars are doing, including accident reports if something goes down and those are released publicly. In general, it feels like the self-driving car companies have gotten much savvier about really spending time engaging with city leaders, with law enforcement that includes police, the fire departments to make sure that even if they don’t have to give those entities any specific information, that they kind of go out of their way to make friends with them because they know that it’s going to be better to have friends in city hall than not.

Lauren Goode: There have been a couple major incidents with self-driving cars, one that WIRED has written about extensively. Aarian, tell us about these.

Aarian Marshall: The first most notorious, I’d say incident that happened with a self-driving car was with a player that is no longer in self-driving cars, and that was Uber in… Gosh, was it 2018? It was a number of years ago now. A car hit a woman who was crossing a highway on ramp and she was killed. It was a really horrible situation. They later revealed that the technology wasn’t quite working in the way it should. The woman was pushing a bike, but she was on foot. The bike had a number of bags on it. The technology wasn’t able to tell if she was riding a bike and she was moving as if she were a bike or if she were a human, and it just wasn’t able to break in time. WIRED has a great feature story by Lauren Smiley if you’re interested in this incident about the person who was operating that self-driving car and sort what that woman has gone through personally. That I would say really contributed to Uber’s decision to get out of the self-driving car game period. So they don’t develop their own technology anymore. They’re now working with Waymo and allowing Waymos to deploy on their network. So that was the first big terrible incident. The other one was something that happened October 2023 with a company called Cruise that was owned by General Motors. This was an incident in which actually the self-driving car wasn’t really at fault. There was a human driven car driving on Market Street in San Francisco. It hit a passenger on foot and threw that woman in the path of the cruise that then also hit that woman. The human that hit that person is still at large. It was a hit-and-run. So we’ve never figured out who hurt this person and they were seriously injured. What came out, gosh, a month later and really upset regulators in California and on a federal level is that it turned out that the Cruise vehicle, it had been sort of trained to pull to the side of the road to get out of traffic, so it didn’t create more of a hazard by just being in the middle of the road. It actually dragged this pedestrian 20 feet because they were still attached to the car and that wasn’t revealed to regulators, and that led to Cruise losing its permit to operate in California and it never recovered.

Michael Calore: But there haven’t been any reported incidents yet with Waymo cars, right?

Aarian Marshall: So far, Waymo has not been involved in a fatal crash. They have been involved in crashes that have hurt people, but nothing that’s killed someone so far. So many people I talk to say it is inevitable that Waymo will be involved in that kind of crash because this is the reality of the road system we have in this country, is that people die on our roads and how will they respond when that happens?

Michael Calore: Something we always end up talking about whenever we hear these incidents of self-driving cars harming humans on the road is what is the cost of human drivers harming people on the road and proponents of self-driving cars will often argue that self-driving cars harm many fewer people than human drivers in aggregate on the roads, and therefore they are safer even when horrific things happen. Isn’t that right?

Aarian Marshall: I don’t have specific numbers in front of me, but I know that there have been several studies that I will note generally are put out by these companies, but that show that their cars get into less serious safety incidents than human-driven cars. They always say robotaxi doesn’t drink, and it’s not going to fall asleep on the road. So that’s all good news. Now, when I talk to researchers who look into this stuff, they have been very clear that we simply do not have enough data to know if that’s the case. These cars are doing a lot of trips, they’re doing more and more trips every day, but they simply do not equal the huge number of trips that we see human drivers take every day and the many millions of miles that they drive. So it’s hard to compare. It’s kind of comparing apples and oranges at this point.

Lauren Goode: Aarian, in those terrible stories, you mentioned in both cases the human drivers that were somehow involved, and when it comes to human drivers, I’m wondering what the impact is of a Waymo rollout, of a broader Zoox rollout on all of the human drivers who make their living driving taxis?

Aarian Marshall: It’s a really great question and I think not something that’s really been adequately answered. If you ask Uber about this or if you ask Waymo about this or if you ask Lyft, they will tell you that’s not going to happen for a really long time. That the future for the next decade or so looks like robots working alongside human drivers. I always say with self-driving cars, it’s not when, it’s where. So for example, in New York City where I am now, it’s going to be a really long time before robots are able to deal with the absolute bananas roads here. I think it’ll be a long time before that happens, but I would encourage people to ask their policymakers about this. I think this goes along with sort of any technology we look at that contributes to automation. What happens to the people who do those jobs now? What do their futures look like? I don’t think we really know.

Michael Calore: Every time I climb into an Uber, I ask the driver how they feel about the self-driving cars on the road.

Lauren Goode: What do they say?

Michael Calore: The answers are wildly different. Some drivers just don’t want to talk about it. They’re like, “Whatever. It’s fine.” And other drivers are either enthusiastically for or against the self-driving cars. The ones who are for it say that they’re good citizens on the road, people like to take them, and if people want to be alone, they should be allowed to be alone and that’s fine. What I did notice is that recently there was an option in the Uber app for you to choose to not have a conversation with your driver. So it feels like if you’re the type of person who would rather just be alone in the car, but you want to take an Uber or Waymo is not operating in your city, you now have the choice to do that. That feels like a response to that desire, to not want to talk to people while you’re in the car.

Lauren Goode: That feels a little bit darker than just taking Waymo where you are explicitly not talking to a human. Just-

Michael Calore: Super awkward.

Lauren Goode: Tapping something in an app to let the person know who’s giving you a lift.

Michael Calore: Don’t talk to me.

Lauren Goode: Don’t talk to me, really.

Michael Calore: But if you’re going to do that, you have your reasons and we have to respect that.

Lauren Goode: Fair enough.

Michael Calore: Well, anyway, let’s take another quick break and we’ll come right back with more. Aarian, you just said that as far as self-driving cars taking over the roads, it’s a matter of where more so than when, but I’m curious if you have any thoughts about when and/or where the balance is going to tip and we’re going to wind up with a city or a place with more self-driving cars, more self-driving vehicles on the road than human-driven vehicles?

Aarian Marshall: Frankly, I kind of have no idea. I will say I wouldn’t be surprised if it were outside the United States. In the US, people like to drive and they feel it’s an important part of their identity and their personal liberty. I wouldn’t be surprised to see, for example, somewhere in the Middle East. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen where there’s a very centralized, powerful government that can just kind of say one day, “No more human-driven cars anymore, starting very soon. Go forth.” That wouldn’t shock me, but I think it’s a little ways away.

Michael Calore: But what is going to happen to the bus?

Aarian Marshall: This is a great question.

Michael Calore: We love our buses.

Lauren Goode: Do you mean if more capital is flowing into these privately run companies and this is what takes over our road, does it actually mean there’s less funding going into public transit?

Michael Calore: And I also think that there are people active in government right now in the United States who are looking at the amount of money that we spend on basically inefficient and dirty and difficult to manage bus systems and thinking that that money could be better put towards automated systems.

Aarian Marshall: This is also one of my obsessions, Mike. So I will say that we’ve sort of seen these ideas trialed out and not quite worked in the context of Uber. So these have drivers, but we’ve seen city governments say, “Hey, running a bus system is a pain in the butt. Why don’t we just have on-demand Ubers that come and pick people up from their homes and take them to where they want to go? Isn’t that more efficient and won’t that save us money in the end?” There have been cities that have tried this out and they have run out of their budget extremely quickly because people are really into being picked up at their homes and then dropped off exactly where they want to go, and it’s not efficient because you have one body, in this case, two bodies. Because you have a driver, but they don’t really count in a car, and that takes up X amount of space on the road, and if you have a ton of those cars flood the at one time because they’re really cheap because there’s no driver you have to pay for and the costs are already baked in, you get a ton of traffic. I mean, that’s what we’ve seen with Uber. We’ve seen cities that brought Uber in. Uber and Lyft when they first came out, they said, “Hey, we’re going to actually get rid of traffic because everyone’s going to be able to sell their car.” It turns out that wasn’t the way it worked. People didn’t sell their car. They just used Uber and Lyft for kind of one-off trips. In fact, some people bought cars so that they could drive for Uber and Lyft, and we actually ended up having more traffic in cities. So I think that’s kind of the big fear.

Lauren Goode: So one thing, we haven’t really talked about are freight trucks because for a while, companies like Uber were making investments in that and then seemed to back away from it. There are still some other companies, I think Kodiak is one in Texas that are pretty interested in making autonomous shipping a thing. Aarian, where do we stand on that?

Aarian Marshall: They still exist. They’re out there working on it. A lot of this is happening in Texas because of the lack of regulation that’s happening there. They’re working on it, and some people see great promise in the technology, and it’s being tested everywhere from California to Atlanta, Georgia mostly on highways. I will say that it feels a lot riskier to governments, and that can freak them out because if something goes wrong with a Waymo that’s traveling on a street in San Francisco at 10 miles per hour and it freezes, it’s really annoying for everyone. It is not the end of the world. If something goes wrong with a truck that’s carrying more than 10,000 pounds of goods and it’s traveling at 70 miles per hour on a highway, that could be really bad. A lot of companies are working on fixing this, and they see, because freight is kind of the lifeblood of so many places, economies. There’s huge upside there, but it’s taken a little while and I think it’s notable that Waymo, for example, has pulled out of its truck operations. It’s no longer working on trucks. They just clearly don’t think it’s worth it.

Michael Calore: Well, you bring up a good point, which is that there are significant regulatory barriers to self-driving trucks being on highways just as there are less significant regulatory barriers to self-driving cars being on city streets, and I’m curious who the big players are here as far as regulations go. We know how cities mostly operate independently, but once you’re talking about highways, you’re talking about different regulatory bodies.

Aarian Marshall: I’d say that the big thing to watch right now is, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this guy called Elon Musk. He is the first buddy of the United States right now.

Michael Calore: Tell us more.

Lauren Goode: He’s a regular on this podcast.

Aarian Marshall: And Elon Musk has said prior to Trump taking office that he really wanted to prioritize autonomous vehicle regulations. In general, the federal government has taken a pretty slow and hands-off approach to regulations, but there’s a possibility that they could put in some sort of regulation. This would probably have to be passed by law through Congress, which is not something we’re seeing a lot of lately, but who knows? And they could preempt all of these rules that are going on in states. Now I don’t think that’s a slam dunk for them. In general, states have their departments of motor vehicles, and those are regulated by the states and general autonomous vehicles have been regulated by DMVs, so they’re kind of clinging to their power in that way. But that’s something the autonomous vehicle industry really wants is just one rule for everyone. Everyone has to go through the same process. It doesn’t matter if you’re in New York City or Peoria or Omaha.

Michael Calore: Nice. Lauren, what are you keeping your eye on in this space? What are the things that you’re looking at about self-driving cars that you want to see change or get better or go away?

Lauren Goode: Or go away. I don’t want them to go away. I think I would like to see some really smart predictions from economists who of course are not always right. None of us are always right about what this actually does mean for the labor market, what it means for drivers. That’s the first thing. The second thing is highway driving, I think. Because that to me, if that becomes mainstream and it’s safe is probably one of the things that would make me give up having a car, and yet it is more terrifying than being on city streets. The idea of going 65 miles per hour in a self-driving car is in fact a little terrifying, but that seems like a threshold. What about you? What are you keeping an eye on?

Michael Calore: The thing that I keep thinking about is the humanity of it all. When you leave your house and you call a car to take you somewhere and a person shows up in the car, you get in that car, you talk to the person, you interact with the person in some way, and maybe it’s not the best interaction or maybe it’s a positive interaction, but either way, their humanity rubs off a little bit on you. Likewise, if you drive a car or like me, if you ride a bike, you’re out there on the road and you’re sharing the road with other human beings, and some of them are in a generous mood, some of them are in a foul mood, some of them just are in a hurry and they’re driving really fast, and those can be pleasant interactions. They can be very unpleasant interactions as long as you don’t get hurt, they’re harmless. But again, you’re interacting with human beings and their humanity is rubbing off on you. So in a world where you’re getting in a car and there’s no human in that car, or in a world where you’re going onto a road where it’s mostly non-human cars on the road, then I feel like you lose a lot of the human interactions that we rely on to keep us human and to keep us normal people who know how to interact with each other. So I feel like it would just sort of increase feelings of isolation and loneliness and lack of community, and a lot of the things that cause a lot of our problems as a society if we don’t have humans in those public spaces.

Lauren Goode: The fact that we talk so much I think on this podcast, but in general about what it means to be human, means we’ve already lost something there. And Aarian, what are you keeping your eye on in terms of the future of self-driving?

Aarian Marshall: The stuff I’m really interested in terms of the future of self-driving is pretty nerdy, but something that comes up a lot when I talk to researchers, which is I think these cars have a real opportunity to totally change the way our cities work, for better or for worse. The sort of hell situation is that these rides are so cheap that everyone takes self-driving cars everywhere, and then we spend the rest of our lives trapped in endless gridlock and we sleep and pee and do all of our work in our little own pods, and it’s like, WALL-E, and that’s horrifying to me. So how do we prevent that? We’ve rent that through regulation, and I actually think that self-driving cars present a really interesting opportunity to really think robustly about what we want our cities to look like and what we want our streets to look like, and who we want our streets to be designed for. If these things are going to come in and change everything, maybe we can make them change everything for the better. Maybe there are a few places where only self-driving cars can operate and no cars are allowed in the city, and everywhere else is people walking and biking, and there are a lot of places for people to hang out outside, and they’re third places again where people feel comfortable hanging out and don’t have to spend money to do it. I think self-driving cars could be a really interesting catalyst for a lot of great city change. They could also be terrible, but I’m hoping for the great scenario.

Michael Calore: I agree with you. I hope they lead to a big, beautiful, robust, and free public transit system in every major city in America.

Aarian Marshall: Amen.

Michael Calore: Thank you for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you’d liked what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. We want to thank Aarian Marshall for joining us this week. Zoë Schiffer will be back next week, and I’m told she will be bringing us cookies. Today’s show is produced by Kyana Moghadam. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Matt Giles fact checked this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director. And Chris Bannon is the head of global audio.