In March, the robotaxi company Waymo announced that it was teaming for the first time with the ride-hailing service Uber to provide rides in Austin, Texas. Waymo traces its roots to a secret project started by Google in 2009, with some key staffers having participated in the 2004 Stanford Self-Driving Car Project. It is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. Uber, along with Lyft, provides app-based ride-hailing services outside the usual taxi structure. Waymo's driverless taxis operated commercially first in San Francisco, and now provide service in U. S. cities such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and now Austin.
Last week, I rode with a friend, who was driving, from north Austin to the University of Texas main campus just north of downtown. Our route went along Burnet Road, which is in many ways the prototypical Austin street: four lanes, a center median in some blocks, all kinds of one-story retail businesses along the way with multiple parking-lot entrances in each block, and fairly heavy traffic.
We pulled up at a red traffic signal, and a few feet ahead of us in the lane to our right were two Waymo driverless cars, one in front of the other. There were no passengers and of course, no driver. They are easy to spot from a distance, even if you can't see whether anyone is in the driver's seat. A thing like a black police gumball on top of the roof spins constantly, as do smaller gizmos on each side of the car, and it bristles with wide-angle camera lenses and less identifiable technology, as well as logos letting you know what it is. The Wikipedia article on Waymo says the vehicles are equipped with 360-degree lidar (light-based radar) with a nearly 1000-foot (300-meter) range, radio-type radars, and an extremely sophisticated AI processing system. Also, some stray comments on a Reddit page indicates there are human "remote monitors" who are responsible for several cars each. So yes, they look completely autonomous, but somewhere in the background there's a human ready to intervene if something unusual happens.
I didn't know all of that as I gazed at a technology that has been on the streets in some form for at least a decade. But I have never actually seen a driverless car that close, let alone two of them.
The car in front was facing the intersection when the red light changed to green, and sure enough, it knew to start going, just like somebody was driving it. This is not a true-confession column, but I have to admit something here. Seeing those driverless cars acting so normal gave me the perverse urge to try to mess them up somehow, to wave a hand in front of one of the cars or something just to see how clever it was. It was only a brief stray thought, but its strangeness struck me. I am normally a live-and-let-live type of person, not given to vandalizing-type ideas. But there is a radical difference between reading about things and seeing them for yourself.
Philosophers make a distinction between two types of knowing. Knowing by description is what you would learn about riding a bicycle, say, by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle. You might understand the physics of bicycles, you could answer detailed questions on bicycle dynamics, but if you had never actually sat on a bicycle or tried to ride one, your knowing about bicycles is only the first kind of knowledge: knowledge by description.
On the other hand, knowing by acquaintance requires a personal physical encounter with the thing known. Up to last Wednesday, I had known a lot about autonomous vehicles. I have blogged about them probably dozens of times. But all my knowledge was by description, not acquaintance.
Seeing those two Waymo cars in the flesh, so to speak, was qualitatively different than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos. I was right there, not twenty feet away from them, and if something happened to go wacky with one of them, I could be personally in danger.
Not that Waymo has had too much trouble along those lines. Wary of how one spate of bad publicity can ruin an entire project, Waymo has been very cautious in choosing its operating locations and in keeping a nearly spotless safety record so far. According to Wikipedia, the only fatal accident involving a Waymo driverless car happened when an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was involved in a multiple-car pileup set off by a Tesla driver who was going 98 MPH before the crash. Waymo can hardly be blamed for that.
Austin is a good choice for Waymo's initial teaming with Uber, as it is full of technophiles who will take a driverless Uber ride just for the thrill of it. The annual international futurefest called SXSW (originally South by Southwest) was held in Austin in March, and I'm sure many of the out-of-town participants were tickled to get Uber rides in Waymos, which was probably one of the main reasons they were rolled out that month.
There are still some people like me who will have generally negative feelings towards robotaxis. For one thing, you're not going to have the huge variety of interpersonal experiences that riding in a human-driven cab provides.
Just for example, a couple of weeks ago I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, and the closest airport was in Kansas City, a 50-mile-or-so drive away. The place I was visiting hired a limo service to pick me up at the airport, and for the hour or so drive to Lawrence I had a fascinating conversation with a native of Veracruz, Mexico, who was as full of local and international tourist-type info as he was curious about various exotic places I'd been.
Waymo isn't going to do that. All you're greeted with is an empty car with a few control buttons, and no conversation. At least not yet, but maybe they'll add a Cab-Chat app for people who miss the old days of human drivers.
Sources: The Associated Press carried an article describing Waymo's teaming with Uber in Austin at https://apnews.com/article/uber-waymo-robotaxis-austin-texas-988aba46988e649be8cf59979587a8e5. I found a reference to human monitors of Waymo cars at https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1f3ur68/current_waymo_revenue_per_car/?rdt=36096. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Waymo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/.
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