The Situation: My First Waymo

The Situation on Monday catalogued a series of things you might have missed over Thanksgiving. 

Yesterday, I learned that if you blink—or focus on The Situation—even for just a second, the robots will come for the gig economy jobs.

Yes, I took my first ride in a driverless car yesterday. And I immediately turned into what should become a new cultural stereotype—that guy who rides in a Waymo and then writes about it. 

I was in San Francisco and had to get to a lunch appointment in Palo Alto. I figured it was a good opportunity to try my first Waymo, the driverless cars by the company that proposes to do to Uber and Lyft what Uber and Lyft did to taxis.

Now let me start by saying that there was no good practical argument for taking a Waymo to Palo Alto.

An Uber would have cost me $100.81 and gotten me there in just over an hour.

The Waymo, by contrast, promised to cost more and deliver less—much less. It would cost $109.47 and proposed to take a whopping two-and-half hours to get me a mere 30 miles. Why so much longer? Because the Waymo won’t go on the highway, at least not yet. It would take city streets. It was objectively a bad deal.

On the other hand, taking the Waymo would allow me to contribute to the de-post-industrialization of America—to personally deprive some gig worker, whose union job had long since been shipped overseas, of a much needed, if highly exploitative, fare. It would let me reach into that person’s pocket, take that fare out, and put it instead in the hands of a Silicon Valley tech company that had replaced that gig worker with a snazzy robot driving, of all things, a Jaguar.

That was irresistible. I chose violence and went with the Waymo. It would take me longer and cost me more, but I would get to be part of the problem. So I pulled out my phone, ordered on the app, and climbed into the backseat, completely alone in the vehicle. The care took several minutes longer than an Uber would have to show up.

Being in a Waymo is cool for the first few minutes. I mean, it’s a driverless car, and it works. 

Then it gets boring. 

Because you may be in a Jaguar decked out with a gazillion sensors that are responding to all the human drivers around you doing human-driver things and it may be managing it all much more safely than a human driver could. But you’re still slogging through traffic. In city streets. Not on the freeway.

And the truth is that the Waymo is a very prissy driver. It comes to a complete stop—and I mean a complete stop—at every stop sign. And this is a level of legal compliance that is, well, unnecessary and silly.

No person does this. Because, well, it’s unnecessary and silly. And because every person understands that the law can’t actually require what the stop sign really means—which is something a little subtler than that you must come to a complete stop before it.

What the stop sign really means, as every human driver knows, is that you must pause long enough to look in all directions and you must be prepared to stop completely, and that you must slow down to a near-stop so that you can stop completely if necessary—but that you almost never come to complete stop because, well, that’s unnecessary and silly.

Unless, of course, you’re a robot behind the wheel of a Jaguar, in which case you need a rule, and the rule has to be that you stop completely because that’s what the law says, even though it’s not what the law means, and it’s now what any human driver does.

There are advantages to the Waymo. I didn’t have to talk to an Uber driver. I took phone calls without any sense of being rude. I didn’t have to make chitchat. I could be alone.

And no, it didn’t take two-and-a-half hours to get to Palo Alto on city streets. It turns out that the robot was pretty bad at estimating how long the drive would be. It took a fair bit longer than the Uber would have taken but still a full 30 to 40 minutes less than the app estimated.

But all that said, the main value seemed to be the satisfaction of putting an actual human out of work. And let’s be clear. I paid a premium for a longer ride for that satisfaction.

I know what you’re wondering: What does this have to do with The Situation?

I could lie to you. I could tell you about how the technology of the Waymo is really very similar to that of drones—which is true.

I could make the whole stopping-completely-at-a-stop-sign thing into a metaphor about how prissy compliance with the law is not what we need in response to The Situation. Good robots cannot obey the law too well, or something like that.

I could also make this whole thing into some meditation on the forces that some people believe lie beneath The Situation: economic dislocation from rapid technological development.

I could even stretch to make this about Big Tech and Silicon Valley's unholy, corrupting alliance with the Trump administration or something to that effect.

But all of that would be silly.

This has nothing to do with The Situation.

I needed a break. I took a ride in a really cool robot. I wanted to write about it and make you smile.

And no, I didn’t take a Waymo back to San Francisco. I took an Uber with a human driver. He didn’t talk to me much. It took way less time. And it was cheaper.

And The Situation will continue tomorrow.