When I was 24 years old, I got into a car accident that changed the rest of my life. It was 2014, and I had fallen asleep on a remote stretch of highway while driving from Arizona to Colorado. I ended up spending a lot of time in the emergency room and then ICU supported by machines until my vital signs stabilized.
There was something odd about being brutally forced to realize: everything I was born to do is something a machine can do better. I laid in a fragile state barely able to hold up an iPad to watch reruns of It’s Always Sunny while the machines did the hard work of not only keeping me alive, but monitoring everything to make sure I stayed that way and send out alerts if something went awry.
My friends joked that I had become a cyborg after doctors implanted metal rods and plates in my leg to get me walking again. As I recovered, I became obsessed with what were then called autonomous vehicles. Later that year, I went to work at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and began tracking what seemed like sci-fi technology to the regulators attempting to wrap their heads around the R&D happening around these new autonomous vehicles. There even seemed to be a burgeoning field of PhD-level studies growing around the domain.
I followed the field from a totally different angle, that of someone deeply, personally, invested in it regardless of their past expertise or experience. I believed despite any existing evidence that the most grievous trauma and injuries I had experienced would be preventable for other people once the technology came to fruition. The technology was coming to make it so that people didn’t have to live with the pain I was experiencing or struggle through a years-long recovery simply to walk normally, much less run again.
From my perch at AIAA, I got to see that technology gradually come into appearance. When I found out that commercial planes can mostly fly themselves, I was a bit outraged. Flying was statistically many times safer than driving, and humans were being sidelined there. Yet no similar level of effort seemed to be advancing to produce the same level of safety for the cars and trucks that are more relevant to the average person on a daily basis.
SpaceX seemed to land on some of the early solutions that were promising with the way they could split off the base of a rocket, land that back on Earth, and scoop it up with an autonomous ship. That was a bit more inspiring than the perceived lack of progress with solving the problem that being in a car is basically the least safe thing a person can ever do. Elon Musk also started to promise that Full Self Driving was coming for Tesla vehicles. For a while I even believed it, until his personal dramas and public political radicalization started to overshadow the actual progress on the technology.
I took every chance I could get to examine any new concept with potential. There was Olli the self-driving trolley. There were flying toys, which promised to deliver food on golf courses or medicine to dying children in rainforests or more likely, bombs to a battlefield. NASA planned to touch an asteroid using a complicated automated system. There were tanks and submarines and myriad other concepts that delivered a hint of something to come, but nothing relevant for consumers yet.
There were experts saying that fully self-driving cars would never happen. There were experts saying it was only 5, 10, or 20 years away, and “buy my book”. There was Elon Musk always with next year, next year, whenever investors started to ask the hard questions.
Covid-19 came around, and the science and technology world shifted its efforts to developing a vaccine to free everyone from the cage of social distancing as soon as possible. I secretly wished the same sense of urgency could be applied to my problem. They would find a vaccine, and life would return to normal, and people would continue dying and becoming disfigured from car accidents anyway, I thought.
In the meantime I had become obsessed with 3D printing and electronics. I got hired by a systems integrator to start working on industrial automation projects. I spent the rest of the pandemic era working on that. I struggled to trust that the machines would just work after my experiences with so many things in life. They did, and I easily found a level of success with that, especially with startup and R&D type projects. I became invested in doing automation at the highest level, and what I found was that it was really hard. There were so many edge cases to solve for, there were still humans in the loop most of the time that often had minimal training in what to do and were only minimally invested in any of it going very well, and problems like computer networking and IT security slowed everything down tremendously. Yet, companies still wanted to automate as much as they possibly could, because it saved them money and liability in a million different ways.
By 2024 when Waymo started to open up for business, I was living in LA near their demo zone. I would constantly see the Waymos idling on side streets or cruising around, but it never seemed to be my turn. I was so used to being disappointed by regulatory agencies that blocked any progress on the issue or startups that made huge promises and never delivered anything that I had functionally given up on ever seeing a self-driving car. Waymo also had an intimidating waitlist that nobody I knew had ever seemed to surmount.
Then later that year I was on a funemployment roadtrip to my old haunts back in Arizona. A friend trying to impress offered a ride in a Waymo in Scottsdale. I was more nervous than I expected to be, but readily accepted that offer, having waited at this point, a decade to see any sign of progress toward a useful self-driving car.
Waymo successfully shuttled us around town. It felt eerily like my mom’s most cautious driving moments as we sat in the backseat catching up on other matters. The next day, I couldn’t resist taking a Waymo to go get lunch with my sister and her husband. They had never seen one before and thought it was crazy!
Still, back in LA, progress seemed to be lagging. I saw very few Waymos for almost another entire year, and then suddenly: they were everywhere. I moved again, closer to downtown this time, and it seemed like there were often multiple Waymos at any given intersection, sometimes competing for space with autonomous delivery carts full of burritos and takeout orders.
This past weekend I had a friend visiting from my time in DC. We took Waymos all over the place all weekend, riding around some of the most difficult driving conditions that exist anywhere in urban America. Narrow Hollywood streets with cars double-parked on both sides and pedestrians everywhere. The hills around Echo Park. Koreatown. The automated vehicles handled it all with ease, in the type of situations where a human lacking composure would simply crumble. We sat in the backseat with our shopping bags fumbling through Sabrina Carpenter lyrics while the computer did all the hard work of driving us around, and the world was a much safer place as a result.
The simple reality is that driving a car is obsolete. If you’re in middle America, you can’t see it yet. The future comes slower in places farther removed from a true desperation to avoid dealing with driving and parking. But if you’re in SF, Waymo is already taking over, because this is obvious. Driving a car is dangerous. It’s inconvenient. It’s mentally exhausting without really providing a whole lot of reward in exchange for the trouble.
Despite what politicians may claim, no one is really yearning for the mines, or to pick vegetables and do hard agricultural labor, and soon driving a car will be in the same category. Insurance companies and everyone else will clamor to get away from having to deal with the loss of life and painful, expensive injuries that result from basically preventable car wrecks. A few enthusiasts or populist politicians will still talk about the freedom of the open road while everyone else moves on to embrace the joy of not having to watch for bicyclists and motorcyclists at the most inconvenient possible moments.
Driving is hard, it’s dangerous, and above all: it’s boring. I fell asleep doing it. Many, many people do every year. There is only so much coffee a human can drink to try and stay awake on a long drive. There are many situations where humans simply misjudge the risk and the timing involved with making a turn into traffic or getting onto a highway. Computers never get tired, never get bored, and never lose their cool. They should do the driving.
