Why Are We Still Driving?

24:12We're going to insist upon it.

24:14Ross Douthat:But this is a pretty radically different setup than the entire liability setup we have right now. Yeah. Liability is tricky. The American liability is based on the idea that no consumer can hope to stand up to a big company. So we put all of the weight in legal proceedings on the customer side. And that's led to a jurisprudential culture, if I can use that word, where the cost of getting anything wrong from a manufacturer's side is vast. It's existentially vast. So I told you earlier that there were three big companies in this space. There's Waymo, there's Zoox, and there's Tesla. There used to be a fourth.

24:57It was called Cruise, and it was an arm of General Motors. So it was involved in an accident a few years ago where someone hit someone who was jaywalking, and they threw the human jaywalker into the path of a cruise vehicle, which ran them over. And then the cruise vehicle, because it didn't know what to do, it moved to the safe position. It pulled to the stop, dragging that poor, unfortunate soul with them. And they weren't killed, but they were severely injured.

25:30Ross Douthat:So their injury was much worse because the car did the extra thing. Yeah. A human driver would never have made that mistake. A human driver might have hit the person, but wouldn't have dragged them. Yeah. A responsible human driver, I think, would absolutely have hit them, but would have known there was a human under the car and would have stayed put. But the car didn't have a sensor underneath, and by dragging that person, exacerbated their injuries. That incident ended up killing the company. It was not just the lawsuit, but they were a bit squirrely with the regulators who removed their license to operate, and General Motors said, we can't fund this anymore.

26:08So it all got shut down. One incident. So I understand why the firms are being very gun-shy of assuming liability here, but we need to insist upon it.

26:22Ross Douthat:But does that mean that essentially you have to achieve not just a higher level of safety than a human driver, but some extraordinarily higher level because you will be liable in the way that a normal auto manufacturer wouldn't be? So because this is a new technology, regulators are absolutely holding a self-driving car to a much higher standard than a human-piloted or a human-operated car. Some people find that obnoxious, which is like you'd save lives on net. As soon as it's better than average, let it rip because you'd be saving lives on net. That's not how lawmakers think. They don't think about like how do we get the best outcomes on net.

27:08We get a situation of like, no one can be blamed. So they insist that it's got to be as safe as reasonably possible, like what an engineer calls six nines, 99.9999. I don't think that's an unreasonable standard. Sure, it's going to slow down reaching scale with these things. But there is so much distrust of big tech and of self-driving cars generally. I think that the appropriate strategy of going slow, being safe, and showing that you're not harmful and you're not cavalier is so important if we're going to get the good outcomes that I think this technology can give us.

27:52Ross Douthat:So in practice, how many people could a self-driving fleet kill to be viable? would you say? Is it like one? Well, I mean, it's important to note that one cruise incident, and that was a severe injury. It wasn't a death. Right. But there are very few self-driving cars on the road. I mean, they're in many cities, they're coming, et cetera. Right. But we're not talking about millions and millions of cars or hundreds of thousands of cars. Right. We're talking about a small number. Yeah. But what we have is, courtesy of the state of California, and I hope this is something that the federal government, they're being encouraged to adopt it.

28:32I hope they do. There are very strong transparency requirements. So we know about every incident that UAMO has been involved in, and we've combed through them, and we know that UAMO is safer than human drivers already. You could argue the denominator isn't there compared to the hundreds of millions of miles that humans drive in the United States every year versus the relatively small fleet. So we can't know. But looking at where that data is coming from, like San Francisco is not an easy city to drive in. Like it is a complex environment. If it's achieving safety there, I find it hard to believe that it would find Topeka to be a much more difficult place to work.

29:20Ross Douthat:But I just want to stay with sort of the weirdness factor for a minute, because I think that's an important hurdle here for people. Again, in the example that you gave of the cruise disaster, it was the car doing a weird, inhuman thing after it hit someone. And there have been other examples, right, where Teslas in autopilot mode were involved in similar accidents in Florida, where they collided with the side of white tractor trailers crossing highways, right? Because their cameras, as I understand it, just couldn't see the white against the sky. Again, it's not the kind of accident that human beings are used to getting into, right?

30:06Ross Douthat:And I just wonder, isn't that part of the hurdle that people will have to get over to accept these cars? That when you do have accidents, It's not just the number of accidents. It's that when they do happen, they will feel weirder and more random, maybe, than just like, you know, a guy running a red light and hitting someone. Well, I was writing about this on my newsletter that Waymo had an incident a few months back where they killed a bodega cat in San Francisco. You're right. Would a human have made that mistake? I'm not sure. But every time one of these vehicles makes a mistake, we notice it.

30:46And because it's an inhuman thing where we're used to only having human activity, it does weird us out. It does make us nervous. so regulators i think are responding to that and the two waymo's credit and zook's credit they're moving slowly and carefully to avoid sparking concern that we're we've unleashed robots on our streets that are unaccountable they don't want us to think about it that way

31:14Ross Douthat:right uh and there was a case in santa monica where a child was hit not killed right and in In that case, I think Waymo said, well, a human driver would have been much more likely to hit her at a higher speed. And Waymo successfully, the Waymo car successfully braked, you know, at a speed a human driver wouldn't have. But you could imagine a scenario where a Waymo enters a crowded area and drives faster than a normal human would because it isn't picking up on sort of weirder things going on in that area. Like maybe there's, you know, a fire in a building and everyone is slowing down to rubberneck and the Waymo doesn't see it.

31:56Ross Douthat:But then it successfully slams on the brakes. But it's a different kind of thing on the road, I think. It's like a different way of seeing the road. So the thing to say about that is just like other kinds of sophisticated AI systems, data is what it needs. I can only speculate that the Santa Monica incident happened because it was insufficiently aware that at this particular time of day near a school, it should be behaving even more cautiously than normal. Well, it knows that now. So we'll have fewer incidents like this. Every month that passes, the data sets of all these companies get richer.

32:36These sorts of incidents should get fewer. which is another reason why I approve of the strategy of going slow and being humble and being safe because that's how we win. That's how we thread this needle.

32:50Ross Douthat:Is there a self-driving car equivalent of like a chat GPT hallucination? Like are there scenarios where the car just does something and you don't know why it did it? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you can find videos on YouTube if you've got the stomach for it of Tesla because they've got the most sophisticated driver assist systems where it's just moving along in the lane, then does a hard left and goes right off through opposing traffic, but right off the road. And you struggle in vain to know what possibly encouraged it to do that. So it does happen. Just like hallucinations with ChatGPT, they're getting better all the time, but it's not perfect.

33:34So again, if I was a regulator, I would say, given this scenario, if you're going to operate in public spaces, you had certainly better stand 100 percent behind it because otherwise it'd be irresponsible.

33:50Ross Douthat:And what what are the political obstacles to. Sort of universal Waymo. It's interesting because it does scramble traditional Democrat, Republican right, left lines on the one side. You've got labor interests, and you've got Democratic lawmakers who are sensitive to labor concerns, wanting to go slow. But you've also got Democratic lawmakers who are sensitive to the plight of the most vulnerable, and they identify Uber drivers as one of those classes that isn't worthy of protection. But on the other hand, you also have people who are concerned about spying. The nature of a modern vehicle, and certainly a self-driving car, as we've already talked about it, it's got sensors going all the time.

34:40It's collecting data of everywhere it goes all the time. Who has access to that data? Certainly the operator of the vehicle, the Waymos or the Teslas or the Zooks of this world do. And that means that a sufficiently motivated bad actor could get them as well. Or, I mean, General Motors, just with conventionary vehicles, was selling all the data of everyone driving a GM car on to third parties, arguing that, well, we collected this data. It's ours now. We can sell it. With a Waymo or a self-driving car, it's so much richer. There's so much more potential for data capture. And so civil libertarians and people with national uncertainty concerns have got, well, they've got questions.

35:26Ross Douthat:And in terms of security, so how much like fears of terrorism, for instance, like someone who used super intelligent AI to hack into Waymo system would presumably have the capacity to take over hundreds or thousands of cars at once. Right. Is that that's just in terms of scenarios that people are reasonably afraid of. So in that scenario, yeah, certainly the advent of LLMs means that we've unleashed super hacking. The two points to make are, one, you'd have to hack. You couldn't control every car. You'd have to hack into every one. And as previously mentioned, the car is driving itself. So you'd need to find a very sophisticated way to confuse the car about its environment.

36:19I know a technical expert. I think it could be done, but I think it'd be really hard to do. Which means the second point, which is, in the language of security, Waymo is a hard target. They've got all this cybersecurity behind them. If I was a bad actor, America's power grids, America's utilities, there are so many softer targets out there where you can do more havoc with less effort. I'm not going to say more. That's true.

36:49Ross Douthat:We don't want to sketch out terrorist plans on this show. But I do think there's a connection to these psychological elements that I'm interested in where I feel like the idea of having the automobile you're in be taken over is because it's unfamiliar and novel and tied to sort of personal privacy and personal control. in a way just seems like a more terrorizing act than a blackout and people have lived through blackouts before the opening the opening of the new naked gun movie features a murder committed with a self-driving car as the weapon there's a long history of this in our popular culture like this is a obvious place for our fears go to so you're on to something that this is weird and strange, but in a way that sort of triggers us to be afraid.

37:38Ross Douthat:So then how does the sale happen? When we started this conversation, you made a very strong case that there's these huge benefits in terms of just a much, much safer road. Yeah. But that accumulates slowly and in patchwork and you don't have the data for a while or a long time. most people don't get into car accidents as a regular thing. As many car accidents as there are in the U.S., most people go through a year or five years without getting in one, right? So how do you, as an advocate for this technology or some version of this technology, see it getting over the hump of different forms of public resistance?

38:21So if you watch Mad Men, in the first season of Mad Men, Don Draper, there's an elevator operator that takes you up from the lobby up to the Sterling Cooper offices. By the end of this, there's no elevator operator within a few years because, yeah, the elevator operators were on their way out in the mid-60s. I am sure the first time someone rode in an automatic elevator where they just pressed a button and then it whisked them to their floor without a human there to intervene, it felt strange. But I imagine the fifth time it happened, it didn't feel strange at all. That's certainly everyone's reported experience with Waymos and similar self-driving cars.

39:03The first time you do it, it's either eerie or magical. The second time you do it, you don't notice. You pull out your phone and you're doing whatever it is that you're doing on that. And it's just like someone is driving. You pay no attention to it any more than you pay attention to your Uber. So, again, I don't know if this is their strategy. But from what I can tell, one of the advantages of Waymo introducing very small fleets but into many cities is to inoculate us against this idea that it is strange. So the more people that get to ride even once, the spell will be broken. And we'll see, of course, this is driving something a machine should be good at.

39:44Why shouldn't I have a machine do it? And that's a world, as you've alluded to, which will be safer, but it requires us to be comfortable with it. So I hope that everyone listening to this podcast, the next time they are perhaps traveling for business or pleasure in a city where Waymo or Zoox or Tesla is operating, tries it out. And I think they will see that this is, like they say about other AI, just another technology, a normal, boring technology.

40:14Ross Douthat:Normal and boring, right. Thank you.

40:48Ross Douthat:Give me then, go forward from that, give me the good timeline. Because you're an optimist about this tech, but you have a couple of different scenarios for the future, one of which is better than the other. So give me the good scenario for 2035 and beyond, the way this technology gets adopted and how the world changes. So the good scenario would be Waymo and Zooks and Tesla have all, despite their different approaches, they've all reached scale. So there's healthy competition in the robotaxi market and every major metro. Everyone is using them. It's 40 to 50 percent less costly, which means that you travel more or you've got more discretionary income to spend on other things.

41:31People are giving up their cars. Every household that used to own two cars in an urban environment now owns one. Every household that owned one car now owns none. They use robotaxis to fulfill the space of one of those cars. Consequently, we've got less need for parking. All the parking infrastructure and parking space can be returned to other uses, higher and better uses than just vehicle storage. And people are safer. Fewer people are dying in road incidents. And they get a certain number of hours back every week that they can put to whatever purposes they want to. So they are richer, but they're also freer in the sense they can more exercise those different parts of themselves.

42:21Ross Douthat:And there's less pollution or lower energy costs. We haven't talked about energy and climate change much, but that's part of the story too, right? Every automated vehicle in development that I'm aware of is electric. so to the extent that you want to see a transition away from internal combustion engine cars, which I do, then that's a better world too. Yes. There's going to be more demand for electricity, but it seems that that's going to happen because of AI, no matter what happens in this sector. So we'll have to solve that problem anyway. And well, and in your good scenario, people own fewer cars.

42:56Ross Douthat:Everything is more efficient. People are more accustomed. They get more accustomed maybe to sharing cars and so on. So there might even be less electricity used. Could be. Could be. I think the Jevons paradox suggests that we'll just use more. We'll just use more. Yes, that's true. The car, if it's cheaper, we'll use more of it. Okay. Well, that's a good bridge to what's the bad scenario? Again, where self-driving cars spread and become ubiquitous, but the outcome isn't as happy for society. Congestion is much worse. Trip times get longer. Uh, if you're sitting there playing Candy Crush, maybe you don't notice, but pity the poor soul who doesn't have access to this and has to drive and their, their driving gets worse all the time.

43:44It's easy to imagine a world where we have enough Waymos to really increase congestion, but not enough to really put a dent in private car ownership. So it isn't rational on the margin to get rid of a lot of parking. So we have more congestion, but we don't get to reclaim space. But worse than that, public transit goes into a death spiral. In a world where robotaxis make ride hail half the cost that it is now, you get so many people defecting to robotaxis, which means that public transit gets worse. at the same time that it costs more money to operate. And more and more cities can't afford it, so they pull back, leading to a greater defection to robotaxis.

44:32So people that cannot afford even cheaper robotaxi fares now have a worse transit experience or no transit experience. So they experience less mobility. That's a bad world. In many ways, it's worse than the one we live in now.

44:47Ross Douthat:So what is the fundamental place where the fork happens? I would say there's two inflection points, and they're related to one another. The good scenario depends on Waymo being available quickly and cheaply to everyone. If there's a hard cap on the number of Waymos, you don't get there. So regulators need to be willing to say, no, a future where every other car is a robotaxi is a good thing, and they don't try to prevent that outcome. And so I say it's related because the other side of it is what do public transit agencies do? Do they see robo-taxis as the enemy that has to be kept out? Or do they go with what they call in the 20th century the soft embrace and say, we're going to bring these in?

45:32We don't run long feeder buses anymore that come twice an hour and take 35 minutes to get to the nearest hub. Instead, we replace that with we own some robotaxis or we license some robotaxis, and anyone can get a robotaxi trip that takes them to or from the nearest higher order station. So we begin to bring automated driving into our transit. Our buses.

45:57Ross Douthat:Buses would be robobuses, right? Yeah, that's a really hard road to hoe because public transit agencies are some of the most unionized environments in this country. They're going to see this as a threat to their livelihoods, which it is. So what I hope we can do then is instead of we shouldn't just throw them out en masse. I'm a transit advocate. I want there to be good transit systems, but I also want transit to have benefit of the best technology available. If that means doing a big buyout package one time, we should do that. We should take that deal. But it might be a hard sell in an era of limited budgets.

46:37I don't know. I think there's going to be so much money to be made on the robotaxi side that there's got to be some sort of deal that can be made to make some of the people who are going to lose out whole.

46:48Ross Douthat:So those obstacles to the better future that you've just sketched are kind of left-coded. There are obstacles associated with regulatory environments in big cities, with how mass transit works, things like that. I'm also interested in obstacles to your happy future, though, that might be sort of right-coded, right? And above all, the willingness of people in a country like the United States to actually own substantially fewer cars. because it seems like your good future depends on that too, right? It's not just people are willing to take robo-taxis, Waymos, and so on. It's also that as they get willing to do that, they just decide they don't need to have their own car available.

47:35Ross Douthat:And that does, I think, pretty clearly cut against cultural and behavioral norms in a place like the United States, right? Right. Now, we've seen in urban spaces, because it is owning a car in a place like Manhattan is such a pain in the neck. More and more younger people are choosing to forego a car. They're not even getting driver's licenses. There are always going to be people who want to own their own car. I think young parents will always want their own car to move their kids around. You know, workers are going to want tools to carry from the job. They're going to want their own vehicle to do that.

48:15The objective is not a world where no one doesn't. It's just where you don't need to own as many as you do now.

48:22Ross Douthat:How is it sustainable, though, to have that sort of persistent private car ownership, if self-driving is so much safer than regular driving? Like we talked earlier about the challenge of liability and how figuring out liability is how you figure this out. But isn't there a certain point where that issue flips and everyone looks around and says, my God, a Waymo is a thousand times safer than Ross Douthat behind the wheel of a Toyota Sienna, terror of, you know, greater New Haven. And therefore my insurance premiums for owning a Toyota Sienna that I need to fill with, you know, gear for my oversized family, go up and up and up.

49:04Ross Douthat:And effectively, non-self-driving starts getting priced out. Isn't that a plausible corollary of your optimistic for self-driving future? I think it is a plausible corollary. I don't think it's in the near or even the medium term. But this century, assuming we don't have some sort of catastrophe, could that happen? Absolutely it could. But I think it would be so gradual because Tesla's ambitions aside, I think private cars are going to have steering wheels for decades to come. They're just going to have sophisticated driver assist systems or even self-driving, but only on the highway or only during the day.

49:46I think what will happen is that you will be expected to use such systems when you can. And if you choose not to and you get an accident, your insurance might say, well, our policy says that you have to rely on the systems in situations where it's appropriate. So it's not going to go away overnight. It'll be incremental. And I still think that's to the good as those systems get better and better. Once it reaches a point where it can drive better than us in all scenarios, why wouldn't we want that?

50:20Ross Douthat:Let's talk about that. Do you like to drive? I cannot say that I do. Okay. I like to drive. I'm not a car person, right? I've never bought an old car and tinkered with it, and I'm not any kind of car brand fanatic. I drive, as I said, minivans right now. But I have always enjoyed driving. It was a pretty big deal to me learning to drive in the middle of my teens as both sort of an assertion of independent separation from parents and also just as kind of a way of understanding and mastering the world, like a kind of step into adulthood. and this is, you know, it is distinctively American in certain ways, but it's American in a way that fits our geography.

51:10Ross Douthat:We're a big country where there's lots of places where mass transit doesn't work and driving has always made sense. It makes sense that we have this kind of culture and this form of adult being in the world. Isn't something lost if that is all given up? Well, some of what is lost is what you've just described. It is a very American thing, the romance of the road, freedom, independence, the ability to go where you want and be in control of it. There's another angle to it. We don't have in contemporary liberal America rights of passage for young people anymore. We don't have many of them. one of them used to be learning to drive it was a sign that you are an adult we trust you with this very dangerous piece of machinery and when you can do it we know you know that you've arrived and it's also you know what i suppose a philosopher would call embodied knowledge you aren't just a brain you're also moving this thing and so you have to pay attention you've got have good reflexes.

52:15These are valuable things. And yeah, we are on track to see them, probably not in our lifetimes, but sometimes in this century, we're on track to see them disappear or become very minor.

52:30Ross Douthat:The driver's license as right of passage phenomenon has already weakened in parts of the United States. And, you know, it's sort of a famous part of the larger story of American teenagers being more risk averse and, you know, going around less in the age of the iPhone, right, that teens are more likely to postpone getting their license, right? That's already diminished to some degree. So you can sort of fold this story into the larger story of the kind of safety focus screenification of American youth. And bigger than that, like the death of embodied knowledge, where it's not just screenification.

53:09It's like, I'm a writer, which means I spend most of my time looking at a screen and writing. I'm not working with my hands. But that's the trend, not just of youth. That's the trend of American life, right? So we need to solve this somehow, but we shouldn't be regarded as the special burden of our cars to solve it for us. We need rites of passage. We need more opportunities to live in our bodies and learn embodied skills. but let's not say that we're going to draw the line at driving cars. That seems the wrong place to draw it when they can offer us so many offsetting benefits.

53:46Ross Douthat:But what is the right place to draw it? It just seems like people are going to say that about every step along the road to disembodied existence, right? Because at every stage, you're going to say, well, you know, this new situation is much more efficient. It's much safer. You know, you don't want your kid to die in a car accident. Obviously, I don't want my kid to die in a car accident, right? But that sales pitch is going to be true for any form of embodied knowledge, right? Doesn't embodied knowledge by its nature contain risk and peril? Isn't that what embodiment is all about? It absolutely is.

54:26And all I can say is, if we want driving to make us have full and healthy relationships to the world and to ourselves, I think we're asking too much of driving. You ask me where we should draw the line. I have to say I'm not a minister and I'm not a philosopher, so I can't tell you that. All I can tell you is that if we have a tool that can save lives while also giving people their time back, I think we would be a fool not to pick it up and then use that time and money we save to invest that into solving this problem.

55:06Ross Douthat:We'll be a political profit then, though, just for a minute. If the scenario you're describing comes to pass, wouldn't you expect this to be potentially just a vast culture war issue, too, where you have blue states in the United States, liberal states, you know, having one set of insurance rules for driving your own car and red states having another sense? And, you know, you cross over into the free state of Montana and it's much easier to get a driver's license or it's much easier to own a car. I mean, it seems like what you're describing is a potential political, cultural fault line that could actually define American politics in an interesting way.

55:45Oh, yes. I mean, there's nothing Americans can't turn into a culture war battle if they try.

55:51Ross Douthat:That is, well, that's because we care. We care so much, Andrew. But the interesting thing about it is that right now it goes the other way, right? Right now, Texas and Tennessee are much more open to self-driving than blue states. California is a big exception because it's the home of the industry. But Washington and Massachusetts and right here in New York State, there's much more friction for the arrival of self-driving cars. So it seems like it's... No, that's the fascinating thing. The libertarian states are, you know, building the gallows on which human agency and independence will eventually be hanged.

56:31Ross Douthat:That seems like a total possibility. Yeah, it was like, you know, history. It'll surprise you. The ironies run deep. Yes. No, that's a really good point. You live in Toronto. Have you ever driven to Vancouver? Oh, no. No, never? No, I've driven to Montreal several times. I've driven as far out as Halifax. That's almost as far. Several days' drive. Several days' drive. Okay. Okay. I drove across the country with my family a few years ago. And, you know, whenever you do things in life that you come to with a set of sort of philosophical priors, obviously it tends to confirm them. But I left that experience feeling very grateful that I have the right and the freedom to get behind the wheel of a car and sort of steer it over giant, vast mountain ranges and so on.

57:25Ross Douthat:so really my takeaway from the end of this conversation is I want to get the New York Times to pay you to rent a large American automobile and drive it from Toronto to Vancouver and see if it makes you any more inclined to defend one's God-given right to drive a car I'd be happy to run that experiment we'll talk about it off camera Andrew Miller, thank you so much for joining me thank you very much, it's been a pleasure to be here

58:15Ross Douthat:Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain, and Emily Holsneck. Jordana Hochman is our executive producer and editor Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker Mixing by Afim Shapiro Audience strategy and operations by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski, Andrea Batanzos, and Emma Kelbeck Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusek, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Mike Puretz And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.