Driverless Taxis Are Safer - DTNS 5157

0:02This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context, and help each other understand this crazy dark world. Today, it turns out driverless taxis are way safer. So why are we letting these humans drive? Yeah, let's have a debate about should humans be allowed to drive. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. So autonomous car service just keeps expanding in China and the U.S. and elsewhere. Didi offering a driverless taxi service in Guangzhou. Uber launching with AvRide in Dallas or AVRide in Dallas with safety drivers for now.

0:44Waymo has begun testing also with human safety drivers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. I don't know why I said human safety drivers. We don't have dog safety drivers yet. Well, depends on what kind of Facebook reels you are. Yeah, right. Yeah. Or what you're seeing on Sora. You can find autonomous taxis in various states of testing all over the place. Europe, Middle East, China, the United States. So how are they doing? Well, they're getting less annoying. One complaint is that they drive too cautiously, over cautiously. The Wall Street Journal has a story that Waymo has tweaked it, and there's evidence that their cars are getting less cautious.

1:20Anecdotes include spotting one doing an actual illegal U-turn in a safe situation where there are no other cars around, not stopping at a four-way stop because it was a multi-lane four-way stop and another car was proceeding. So it was not going to be in anybody's way to just keep going. That's an aggressive taxi driver style move. Crossing double yellow lines to get around obstructions. That's when one of the big complaints is like somebody's blocking a lane because they're unloading and the Waymo will just politely wait 30 minutes while they unload rather than go across that double line. Now it'll go across that double line.

1:58And in one case, a pedestrian getting a little spooked because usually Waymo's wait until you're all the way on the sidewalk, which is legally what you're supposed to do in a lot of regions. But this time it just waited until he was safely out of the way and went. They have been quite a bit safer than human drivers. Despite this easing up on the cautious stuff, Waymo recently released data from 100 million driverless miles through this past June. They collected the data in four U.S. cities And neurosurgeon Jonathan Slotkin analyzed the results for an opinion piece in the New York Times, trying to make the argument that this is a health benefit to have driverless taxis.

2:38When compared to human drivers on the same roads, Waymo cars were involved in 80 percent fewer crashes causing an injury and 91 percent fewer serious injury crashes. Waymo had 96 percent fewer injury related crashes at intersections, which are usually the deadliest crashes. To express it another way, in those 100 million miles, there were two fatalities and one serious injury in crashes that involved Waymo cars. In all three cases, a human driver was found by police to be at fault. So in one fatality, a human driver ran a red light, hit a Waymo, hit other vehicles, and then struck and killed a pedestrian.

3:20The Waymo was involved, but in no way hit the pedestrian. In the other, a motorcyclist rear-ended a Waymo, then that motorcyclist was hit by another human driver. So they hit the Waymo, but again, it wasn't the Waymo that caused the fatality. So involved in a small number of human fatalities, but not at fault. And you look at this, 80 % fewer crashes when you've got no driver behind the wheel instead of a human. Yeah. So I know that I'm sort of the Waymo apologist of the DTNS crew, because there are just so many in my neighborhood. I'm telling you, I mean, every one out of five cars is a Waymo.

4:02And I'm not even exaggerating. It's cray cray. um and uh you know just uh observing that you know when i walk around the neighborhood or that kind of stuff uh i've never seen a waymo do anything weird i did actually see a waymo blow a stop sign once but it was like very early in the morning and it was on a side street and i was like yeah i mean humans do that too yeah you're not supposed to and if there was no one around no harm done although there was no harm done but i definitely saw that but that was a long time ago um at this point the only time that i'm sort of overly cautious when i am around waymos is when i'm in my own car because i you know i'm i it almost makes me feel like i need to you know like 10 and 2 okay got a way behind me yeah right you know i i don't want the waymo to like get confused by me.

5:01And just yesterday, I was pulling back into my driveway off the street, Waymo behind me, put on my blinker, slowed down, Waymo slowed down as well. There was no incident, but it does almost make me feel like I'm more overly cautious because I'm trying not to screw up the system. Yeah. No, I had a similar situation yesterday. I was in Santa Monica and I was turning left, left and there was a Waymo coming. And instead of usually you kind of like just roll into the intersection and angle the signal like, Hey, I'm going to turn left. You know, once you guys are passed because it was a Waymo and I could tell, I was like, I am just going to sit still.

5:44I don't want to confuse this Waymo into thinking I'm about to dart in front of it. And the Waymo proceeded on just fine. And then another Waymo came and actually stopped because pedestrians were crossing. and that caused the cars in the other lane to stop when they might not have stopped to let the pedestrians cross. So I thought that was an interesting side effect as well. Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of, I think that the knee-jerk reaction that I have and maybe other people have is, oh, the Waymos are supposed to be more like taxi drivers, being more aggressive on the road. People go, oh, well, that's not good.

6:21However, like you said, there are situations where it's like that the the car the autonomous car has to know like yeah these these cones aren't going away i have to go around this in a in a strange way to you know to to to keep the process going and there you know and again anecdotally in this wall street journal article there were people saying i used to not take a waymo if i was going downtown san francisco because it would take too long because it would it would follow all the rules so strictly that it would just take forever to get there. Should have just taken my scooter. Yeah, exactly. And so now they're like, oh, and now it drives more reasonably.

6:59And obviously, we can have a big debate over what's reasonable and what's not and what's unsafe and what's not. But I don't think there's too much argument with this data that Waymo has published transparently for everybody to poke through and look at that they are quite a bit safer with a lot of margin forever. Yeah. I, I, you know, as much as I talk about how much I love Waymo, I actually don't use Waymo vehicles all that often because I have a, I have a car of my own and, you know, there, there are situations. I mean, I've used one a handful of times at this point and I will say they feel very safe.

7:37Now you, you can say, nope, not for me. Dystopian, you know, it's, it's, I'm not doing it. And that's fine. Or you might be in an area where it just isn't available. And not just Waymo, but a variety of other autonomous services. But it's happening, people. It is happening. Yeah, it's definitely happening. And I thought it was interesting, Dr. Slotkin making the public health recommendation. Now, he wasn't saying there ought to be a law, but he was sort of advocating like public policy should encourage driverless cars because they are safer and they are saving lives. And he suggested, you know, we could even almost eliminate traffic deaths if we had enough driverless cars, which again, you can debate the ups and downs of that, but you can't debate the fact that so far, 100 million miles in, Waymo is safer than a human driver.

8:35yeah like in 50 years uh you know knock on wood we'll all still be around um you know our our is is driving a car gonna be like a hobbyist thing or yeah will it be a thing where where kids will be like i can't believe people used to be allowed to just drive cars whenever they all just you had to drive yeah every day that's so unsafe like how do you live yeah it's such a waste of time. Yeah. Well, everyone, DTNS is made possible by you listening right now. We want to thank Pat. We want to thank Mike Cortez. We want to thank Erwinster and Alex Fagan. Thanks, everybody, for supporting us. There's more we need to know today.

9:23Let's get to the briefs. HBO Max has launched a remastered 4K version of the show Mad Men, But the new resolution lets you see a bit too much. For example, in season one, episode seven, and I hope I'm not spoiling anything for anybody, Red in the Face was the name of the episode. There's a scene where Roger Sterling, played by John Slattery, vomits his oyster lunch. It's very embarrassing. It's a whole thing. In the new 4K version, you can see the crew member operating the fake vomit pump off to the sides. This isn't just a case of you couldn't make him out before the 4K version. No, no, no. He was not in the HD version.

10:08He wasn't there. A source told The Hollywood Reporter that Lionsgate, which produced Mad Men for AMC, gave HBO Max the wrong file. Yeah. Yeah. So clearly what happened is they wanted to upscale from source material and the source material hadn't masked out the crew person in that scene. And someone forgot or didn't notice to go in and remask them. Whether it was Lionsgate that was supposed to do that or HBO that was supposed to do it, I don't know. It sounds like Lionsgate was either supposed to do the masking or at least provide an unmasked version to be upscaled to 4K. It sounds to me like Lionsgate was doing the 4K remastering for HBO Max.

10:54And they forgot to give him the one that had already been gone through and looked for that stuff. And there's the guy. And there's a few other less egregious examples of this. There are. There's one where Peggy Olsen is walking down the street and she's walking past a store selling SIM cards. not happening in the 1960s. Right, right. Just, you know, blink and you miss it, but it's there. Right. I don't know that there's any long-term impact to this other than that that is kind of funny and it just goes to show that, you know, humans make a lot of mistakes. It's unsafe to let them do things. We should have had AI doing this.

11:36We can't drive and we can't make movies. No, but in all seriousness, I actually love the little details of when slip-ups happen in movies or TV shows. You know, there's a whole meme about them online. And, you know, every once in a while, I'm like, yeah, I get it. Yeah, it was a little slip-up. But it kind of reminds me that lots of people work on these shows. And it kind of, I don't know, makes it more human. Yeah, it takes a lot of people to make this stuff happen. And you're right. It's a nice reminder. I like looking at it that way. Some people get all mad and I'm like, there's nothing to get mad about.

12:20It's just abusing to me. So, yeah. Yeah. This one happened fast. As Mohan noted on Patreon, India's Department of Telecommunications has revoked the order we talked about Monday and revisited yesterday that would have required all phone makers in India to pre-install the Sanchar Sathi anti -theft app. Apple, as we mentioned yesterday, and Google, since we recorded the show yesterday, had both said they would not comply with this order, that they would not be pre-installing this app. The government decided not to make the pre-installation mandatory for mobile manufacturers, according to the government.

12:58That really did happen fast, didn't it? Yeah. We were wondering yesterday, like, ooh, are they going to make Apple, like, you know, put it as an option? Are they going to try a ban? And then Google weighed in on it. And I think India was like, okay, the two biggest manufacturers of operating systems for mobile. Yeah, like Apple and Google are already saying, nope. Maybe we don't want this fight. So I think - It's now not mandatory, but something that you can opt into. Yeah, you could always get it voluntarily. They were just like, oh, this is having such a good effect on reducing theft. Let's make everybody install it.

13:33And that ended up not being a good idea, apparently. Well, and, you know, I don't feel like India's Department of Telecommunications was doing something nefarious at all. You know, it seems like it was coming from a good place. But again, that is going to be a privacy issue for many manufacturers. Yeah, it wouldn't have to be nefarious. Obviously, the opposition parties in India and a lot of the privacy organizations in India were saying, well, wait a minute, this is collecting a lot of your information and now the state wants it everywhere. They say they're not going to use it for any nefarious purpose.

14:14Do we believe them? Now it's in your hands to decide whether you believe them or not, and then you can install it. Well, if you have access to Amazon's newest advanced voice assistant, Amazon Prime Video, and one of Amazon's Fire TV devices, you can now describe a scene from a movie and then jump right to that scene. Amazon gave some examples. For example, jump to the boulder scene where he's being chased in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or jump to the scene in Red One where Santa flies over the city. Amazon says it should work with thousands of movies and it's indexing movies all the time. I noticed all their examples started with jump to the scene, jump to the whatever.

15:01So I think that may be best practice to use that. But pretty cool if you forgot where you left off and it didn't remember your place or you were watching it somewhere else or you just want to find that one scene. Just the scene that you like. That iconic scene. jump jump to the place where Luke and Leia jump across the chasm you know whatever it is I actually when I was looking at the story earlier I was like was the boulder scene Raiders of the Lost Ark or uh it is it is because I looked it up it's a good it's a good question like if you said jump to the boulder chase scene in uh Temple of Doom would it be smart enough to go do you mean Raiders of the because yeah because i was sort of like was that that it's been a while since i've seen the movie but uh yeah um i like this i i i don't know how often i would i would use this but uh i think the more that uh obviously amazon and other companies are trying to make us feel more comfortable with natural language do this for me this is a great example of that yeah and this is something where If it gets it wrong, there's no consequences.

16:15It's like, oh, it went to the wrong scene. Maybe you get frustrated. Yeah, I'll just find the other one. Google is testing expanding its LLM features, some of them in a good way, some of them not. You might see AI mode search now integrated into the search results page rather than in a separate tab. You know, you have search and the news and then images. AI mode is its own one of those tabs. They're testing saying like, well, let's just let you do it in line because you have that AI mode already in the search results. Well, what if you could just use that like or the AI overview in search results?

16:49What if you could use that like AI mode? So a few people may see that. Another test is not going so well. Google Discover, which is the section of the Google app on mobile that gives you a personalized feed of news, has been doing a little experiment with headline writing. The Verge found that Google has been using an LLM to rewrite the headlines. And as is often the case with an unsupervised large language model, they are sometimes weird or even just wrong. Here's some examples. A 9 to 5 Google article had the title, Don't buy a Qi2 25-watt wireless charger hoping for faster speeds, just get the slower one instead.

17:30That's the actual headline. The way Gemini rewrote it was, Chi 2 slows down older pixels. Oh, yeah. Not what it said. Well, and I can imagine if you have an older pixel, you might be like, what's happening? Yeah. Oh, but I was going to get a Chi 2. A PC gamer story had a very clever original title. Child labor is unbeatable. What? Baldur's Gate 3 players discover how to build an army of unkillable kids through the power of polymorph and German media laws. So basically it's a thing you can do in the game and you're using in-game children avatars. However, Gemini changed it to BG3 players exploit children.

18:16Yeah, that's going to rile some people up unnecessarily. Actually, Gemini was true. It was true. They are exploiting children. They're just virtual children, not real children. Right. And then here's the last example. we'll go through. Ars Technica had a story about the steam machine's possible price, right? We don't know what the price is for the steam machine, but the Ars Technica story's headline was, Valve's steam machine looks like a console, but don't expect it to be priced like one. The story doesn't include the price. It doesn't promise to tell you what it will be. It just makes speculations.

18:51The title that Gemini came up with in the end was just - Was that we have a price? Steam machine price revealed. That was the Gemini headline. Yeah, I mean, this is a great reminder for everybody who uses AI tools. And I am one of you. Probably not as much as, you know, the next guy. I'm still very cautious about this stuff, mostly because for a living, I write headlines exactly like this, you know, where I ingest headlines and make something out of it to become a show that hopefully you all listen to afterwards. So I'm always scared that it's going to end up making me sound like I don't know what I'm talking about.

19:38Yeah, you're going to introduce some inaccuracy or something. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, and I always caution everybody just like you got to double check your work. Double check your work. You know, this is you've got an AI intern right now. Just make sure the intern didn't do something weird. because Lionsgate and HBO Max are reaping the rewards of that situation. But yeah, it's a good reminder to all of us that as all these tools get better and better and we rely on them more and more, just remember, you still got a brain. Yeah, Google told the Virgin is a test, not a full-scale release, which presumably means not everybody is getting these generated headlines.

20:21You may not like that Google was testing on actual people with mistaken headlines. But yeah, I think it's also Google has an uneasy relationship with news publishers. Sometimes news publishers want you to only use the text from their headlines and nothing else. Sometimes they are like, we don't want you to use our text. We wrote that. You don't have the right to use it. You have to pay if you want to use the headline. So writing its own headline might be in Google's interest. But the tool is not quite there yet. Do you use Google app on mobile, Tom? No, not really. See, I don't either. A lot of people do, though.

20:58So it kind of doesn't matter whether the two of us use it. It's got a huge amount of usage. Finally, some quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news in the future. Anthropic has hired law firm Wilson Sonsini to begin work on a stock IPO, which could take place as early as next year. get your funds in line i guess uh while still opposing its inclusion as social media youtube said it will take steps to comply with australia's ban on allowing users of its service who are younger than 16 and so they will log them out as of december 10th until they turn 16 when which case they can log back in youtube kids however will still be available youtube you're a social media network.

21:45Please. Get real. Are they? I think so. Spotify joined the year end summary party, launching its Spotify wrapped with new features to let you compare data to friends. It also announced its list of top Spotify podcasts, led by drumroll please Joe Rogan. Fifth year in a row. Yep. Yep. Still very popular. Bending Spoons has agreed to buy Eventbrite, and it will add it to its collection of refurbished brands that include Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, StreamYard, and AOL. Google announced a beta feature for the phone by Google app called Call Reason that lets you flag your phone call as urgent when you're calling somebody from your contacts list so that the recipient can see it's from you and that you really want them to pick up.

22:39Yeah, that's kind of cool. As long as, you know. I mean, yeah. Emergency situations. I definitely get that. Yeah, use it springing. And it stays in your call history, too. So if you don't see the call when it's happening, but you see it later, you can be like, oh, maybe I should call this person back. I consider any person I know calling me to be urgent, honestly. Oh, Sam, if you call me, I'm like, oh, God. What happened? the latest update to android 16 lets you unlock your pixel phone with the fingerprint sensor without having to wake the screen first that was something they used to do now it does it again that is handy china's land space successfully launched and orbited a new rocket on wednesday though it exploded when attempting to uh land for reuse uh it was so close so close actually It was successful until it wasn't.

23:32Yeah, they were like, the fact that it exploded was not a big surprise. We weren't sure it would work all the way, and now we've learned a lot to make it work. As of November, Linux users accounted for 3.2 % of all Steam users. That is up from the previous all-time high of 3 % of Steam users that was set just in October. So Linux on the rise. Look at you, Linux users. Yeah. The construction of new data centers is also driving the price of copper to new all-time highs, which is expected to continue to rise, possibly by six times the current price by 2050. That's according to the world's biggest mining group, BHP.

24:13Yeah, now I know what to do with my pennies. Melt them down and sell them. Well, we're not making them anymore. I've got to do it. Exactly. Something with them. Red Dead Redemption is available for the first time on iOS and Android as part of the Netflix collection of games for its subscribers. No additional cost. You can just play it. And the fuzzy companion robot Marumi, which had no practical purpose other than just being really cute and a robot, debuted at CES this past January. It is now available to buy on Kickstarter for around$120 to$150, depending on the model that you get, shipping in April.

24:52A shipping CES product. Always good to see. Yeah. We have products that we can ship to you. They are in our Daily Tech News Show store. R.W. Nash has been reviewing both the holiday mug with Len Peralta's Techie Santa on it and the DT &S pint glass on YouTube. And it's been really fun to see him trying out different beers and different drinks in the vessels. He really, really recommends the holiday mug because you have the Santa art on both sides of the mug. So it doesn't matter if you're left or right-handed, you're drinking the mug, you see the art, other people see the art, everybody wins. You can check out that and all of our various DTNS pint glasses, posters, shirts, hoodies, and more at dailytechnewshow.com.

25:37slash store.

25:41We like to end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. And today, Daniel ponders a potentially humorous situation. Yeah, this was our story a while ago about Meta possibly renting tensor chips from Google. Daniel writes, so Meta is renting tensor chips for their data center. If Meta skips a few payments, I would love to see the repo person go into the data center, get out their multi-tool, pull the Tensor chip from each server and throw it into one of several five-gallon buckets. That would be hilarious. Yeah. I mean, it's improbable, but not impossible. It's not the way it works.

26:27They're in a data center and they rent access to them and you just shut off the access, but it's funny to think about, right? Can you imagine somebody at 3 a.m. is like, hey, Meta, you haven't paid your bill. We're getting in there. We're taking our chips. Meta's driving its data center around trying to avoid the repo, man. I feel like I've seen this on a TV show somewhere. Well, if you're thinking about anything related to tensor chips or anything that we talk about on this here show, if you have insight to a story, share it with us. we'd love to hear from you. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

27:06Yes. Thank you, Daniel, for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. Yeah, I'm talking to you right there, walking your dog or driving to work or hanging out, doing work. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. Join now. Do it. It's fun.

27:26the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program amos we good did we have to go potty again