The Trial of the Driverless Car

25:36We are creating jobs for individuals that want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry.

25:45How you understand a story, in part, has to do with who you hear it from. For months, I'd been listening to the engineers who first dreamed up these driverless cars. From their perspective, they'd only ever really had one question. Could they build a car that drove itself more safely than humans could? Waymo believed the answer was now yes. But Boston had a different question. What about jobs? I did speak to Waymo's Northeast policy manager, Anthony Perez, who said he didn't want to be disingenuous. He expected over time there would be what he called transition for app drivers, but that it wasn't a one-to-one displacement.

26:22He said Waymo would also create jobs, cleaning the cars, maintaining the sensors, repairing the vehicles. The estimate he pointed me to said every five robo-taxis might create one job. But he was also careful to say that it was just very hard to predict the future. Different cities would be different. He wasn't trying to be evasive, he explained. He was trying to be honest about real uncertainty. But in the hearing that day, as Counselor Mejia pressed Waymo's Matt Walsh to describe exactly what jobs his company could provide the existing Uber and Lyft drivers, Matt Walsh came up short. If drivers that currently work for Uber or Lyft should decide that they want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry, there will be opportunities for them to do so.

27:05And what would their job title be? I'm not going to sit here and sort of speculate what their job opportunities would be. Let's just come to terms with the fact that we are creating a hostile environment for our hardworking people who are no longer going to have work. I appreciate the question. I forget the guy's name, but he just felt a little bit arrogant. And I felt like, you know what, even after everybody spoke, there should have been a little bit more humility and humanity in his understanding of why people were so adverse to the idea of losing their jobs. Like, he could have won me over a little bit if he gave me a little bit more heart.

27:48And he didn't. You really think he could have won you over? No. I'm just joking. No. Nobody could win me over it. Part of the issue, Matt Walsh was an outsider. Worse, an outsider from a tech company worth$126 billion. The logic of Boston politics said that nobody in this room had to listen to him. He was here in his role as a well-compensated piñata. I understood that. At the same time, if Waymo was right, if its driver was 80 % safer than a human one, that meant there would be preventable car accidents in Boston in the years to come. Accidents caused by human drivers making human mistakes. We lose our tempers.

28:33We check our phones. We think about other things while driving. We don't mean to, but we do. And sometimes that means we hurt other people. The people we hurt would not be voting in the Democratic primary a week after this hearing, but I thought they deserved to have more of a place in the conversation than they'd had so far. Emily Maltaire, my colleague who'd been observing the interview in Counselor Mejia's office, at one point she chimed in. I feel like for me in learning about this technology, I was very skeptical about the safety of it. And I mean, I've known people who have died in car crashes.

29:07I know someone who died in the backseat of an Uber. I don't think it was the Uber driver's fault. But I feel like as I learned more about the technology, I did take seriously the idea that there could be something safer about Waymo technology. Is that something that you're curious about? I'm not curious about that in any kind of way because when I think about safety, and let's just give you the example of the car accident, I don't see someone instinctually coming out of the car to get someone out. Like if it was a Waymo robot, or it's not even a robot, it's just a wheel, who would be there to help support the consumer?

29:48Who? What? How? So I don't think the safety concern is a good, compelling argument for me. For you, it's like, I don't think there's anything they would show you where you would think, you just trust humans more. I would hope the world would trust humans more.

30:17Counselor Mejia told us when she left that first hearing, she was pretty sure her side had won. The unions, the app drivers, had made their case against the robots. The Waymo executives had clearly been outmatched. The thing was, though, Counselor Mejia had missed something. There'd been one person whose testimony she just hadn't heard. Someone who would speak for two brief minutes and who would begin to change the entire conversation in Boston.

30:46After a short break, Carl.

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33:24On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds. Asking really strong questions is a superpower. You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights. The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks. That's hit the gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more. Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.

34:12Welcome back to the show.

34:18Emily and I had been in Boston a couple days now. The cold snap here was at a level I found frankly offensive. I dressed wrong for it and was getting those full-body jitterbug shivers vibrating down the sidewalk when we'd go outside. Very cold. It's the cold you feel in your teeth. I'm wearing long underwear. Maybe that's your problem. I'm wearing short underwear. Exactly as much as I was suffering, Emily Maltaire was thriving. Emily, a devoted public transportation nerd, she actually worked for a time in Boston's transit agency. Emily was just happy to be here. A mental tropical vacation. She kept cheerfully suggesting we ride the T to get to our interviews and harassing me with Boston transit facts.

35:02Did you know the bus in Boston is only$1.70? That's amazing. Yeah. I was working for the T when they did fare raises. and one of my personal transit heroes, Laurel Padgett-Seekins, fought really hard to keep the bus fares low. What were they at before the raises? Well, the... I would cower in the warm alcoves of whatever local business would let me, then hustle into Ubers whenever possible, insisting that taking cabs here was not a luxury or a weakness. It was, in fact, important research. That's what the story was about. It was a joke, but it wasn't. I did want to talk to as many drivers as I could while I was in Boston.

35:37I'd end up interviewing eight, four at the union's office, and a random sample of four out in the world. Nearly all the drivers described the job as having recently gotten harder, just like Abdi Aziz had. They were working more hours for less money. But the union and non-union workers differed in some important ways. The non-union drivers didn't really have Waymo on their radar. And they were unlikely to think of driving as a long-term career. This matches the data we have. A 2018 study found that the average Uber driver drives for three months. It's a lot of people's first job in our country, the latter to their next one.

36:12So the union drivers were pretty unusual just by dint of the fact that they'd made a career out of this. Those were the things I learned in the cabs I could persuade Emily to take, and in the studies I read about those cabs. This Tuesday, however, we were walking, the Boston wind playfully tearing the skin from my bones. Our mission that morning was to meet a man named Carl Richardson for an interview that was, thankfully, indoors. He met us in the lobby. We'd never met in person before, but I recognized him when I saw him. What gave it away to Carl? Hi, how are you, Emily? Nice to meet you. Hi, Carl.

36:46PJ. PJ, how are you? Good, how are you? Good, good. Come on, buddy. Let's go. Carl has significant hearing loss. He wears two hearing aids. He's also almost completely blind. He has a yellow Labrador with him at all times. That's his guide dog, Dayton. Carl had shown up in these hearings as a private citizen to argue in favor of autonomous vehicles. Like Counselor Julie Mejia, he'd been outraged by what he encountered, but for entirely different reasons.

37:16Chapter 3, The Right to Autonomy. Carl told me the story of the day as he'd experienced it. First of all, when I walked across City Hall Plaza, you could hear protests and rallies, union protests and rallies. To driverless cars, and yes, to human beings. Union! You say power! Union! Power! Union! Power! When I say justice, you say power! Then I walked in, and I got there about an hour early on purpose so I could sign on the piece of paper, and I had my intern with me. She said I was number three on the list. So I was hoping to go early. We got there. I think they were probably, let's see, The food and restaurant union was there.

38:01The app drivers union was there. The SEIU union was there. The Teamster union was there. I remember the ambulance driver union being there. So the disability community was far outnumbered. And I will even tell you that a handful of disabled people left. They were so discouraged based on what they were hearing. They didn't even want to testify. Why? What did they find specifically discouraging? I think that they felt like the city councilors had already made up their mind. And I think they heard anger in the room. So some of the people didn't stay. I felt outnumbered. But I still felt like I had an important story to tell.

38:45Carl, in the room that day, kept waiting to speak. He had expected that because of his early sign-up, he'd be one of the first speakers. Instead, he waited nearly the entire four hours. For some reason, they'd slotted him almost at the very end. Carl Richardson, you have two minutes. Nice to see you. Yes, hi, my name is Carl Richardson. I am the Massachusetts Statehouse ABA coordinator and also an advisory board member for Mayors. You see Carl. He's wearing a light blue button-up and a tie. We've heard a lot about the impact on the union and the drivers and the workforce. Let's talk about the communities I think it would impact in favor of not only people with physical disabilities like myself, but people with mental health.

39:27And by the time I testified, I threw out my written prepared remarks, and I just winged it. We keep talking about employment. I want to have that discussion. Do you know how many jobs I've turned down because I can't get there? Or how many interviews I've turned down? If you spend time talking to Carl, you learn a lot about unemployment in the disability community. It's high. Their unemployment rate is twice as high as the rest of the workforce. One contributing factor to that number that a lot of people don't think about is just transportation. You can't do a job if you can't reliably get to it.

39:59I agree that Uber drivers and paratrans are doing an amazing job. But not always. At least once a week, I get denied access to Uber and Lyft because they refuse to take me because I have a service dog and denying me my civil rights. I often get denied access to because they won't go beyond the city limit because they're worried about maximizing their revenue and the ability to pick up a return fare. My life is not limited to the city limit. And the other thing it would do, it would increase... There's actually been pretty well-documented issues with discrimination by Uber drivers against disabled people.

40:35There's an active DOJ lawsuit about it right now. Wheelchair users whose rides are canceled because it would take extra time to help them load in. Blind people whose rides are canceled once the drivers see a service dog. A spokesperson at Uber said they have a zero-tolerance policy for confirmed service denials, and that Uber fundamentally disagrees with the DOJ's allegations. In the meantime, Carl says he spends a lot of time trying to strategize ways to stop Uber drivers from passing him by. Carl was born with a genetic condition called Usher syndrome, type 2. It meant he was destined to lose his vision and hearing, but gradually and as an adult.

41:13It's a difficult diagnosis, in part because psychologically, it requires you to accept so much. To accept loss knowing that more loss is just ahead. That whatever you get used to, you'll need to get used to more. There was a time in Carl's adult life, for instance, when he had a driver's license. So I drove. I had 20-20 vision up until I was about 30. which is one of the reasons why autonomous vehicles are a big deal to me because I want that feeling that I used to have when I drove of freedom and independence and mobility I know what I've lost and I want that back but people deal with it differently and I have a sister who has it she never took up driving because she knew she was going to have to give that up someday and she didn't want to have her heart broken I said, screw it.

42:05I'm going to drive. I'm going to work in film and television. I'm going to do everything I can. What type of car did you drive? Well, whatever I hadn't totaled.

42:17I drove, what, 10, 12 years? I think I totaled five cars. Because I remember, I was slowly going blind, but I was in denial. So I'm lucky to be alive and sitting here with you today. It was hard to let go of driving? Yeah, but what finally happened is I sat behind the wheel of a car one day, getting ready to go to work.

42:41And I actually said to myself, am I going to get to work alive today? And I sat there, and I couldn't answer it. So I called out sick, and I never drove again.

42:55It's a hard thing to give up. Yeah, and I want it back. And I never thought I'd get it back, but I now believe someday within my lifetime. We might have to convince the politicians you don't need to have eyesight to be able to have the ability to drive an autonomous vehicle, but I think we can do it because it isn't just about blind people. Everybody has a mother they have to take away their driving from. Everybody has a father where they say, Dad, I don't know if you should drive anymore. Everybody has a teenager who's texting on their phone. See, we're not even beginning to think about the possibilities of what autonomous vehicles could do.

43:38The other reason I don't want to ban autonomous vehicles in the city of Boston is because I think eventually it'll lead to personal ownership. And is that what you really want? Oh, you bet. I'm not kidding when I say I have a savings account where I put aside a few hundred bucks a month just for the ability for me to buy an autonomous vehicle someday. And if they ban autonomous vehicles, then they're going to ban me from the right to drive, earn a living, go to school, go to medical appointments, go to the beach on a Sunday, go visit my mom in a nursing home, whatever. With the flexibility that everybody else had.

44:21Carl wanted me to know that even though Waymo had become the subject of this fight, he did not care if Waymo specifically came to Boston. any autonomous car company would do. He just wanted to be able to hail a taxi that couldn't pass him by. And he wanted one day to own a car again. In the hearing near the end of his allotted time, he told a story about something that had happened to him recently, an emergency when he needed a ride. Imagine that you're blind and your mother calls you at seven o 'clock on a Sunday night and says, I just heard from the sheriff's department I'm going to get arrested unless I come up with some money right away.

44:58She got a call. She believed it. I'm the primary caregiver in my family. I had to figure out a way to get out there. And I got denied three times in a row while I was trying to get out to my mother. Public transportation was an option because it was late on a Sunday night. All I wanted the ability was to be able to go home to my mom and say, you're okay, and I love you. And that would be the positive impact of autonomous vehicles. So, yes, definitely think about the human component and the people component, but think about it for the whole community at large, not just the union. Thank you. Thank you so much, Carla.

45:39How do you think the politicians in the room saw you? Well, I don't think they were there to hear my speech. The only one that was there to hear was the chair of their hearing.

45:52So I'm here alone now, so I think it's time to adjourn the hearing. All the other city councilors had left before Carl's testimony. Many of them had announced in the hearing that they had to go attend a different Teamsters event, a strike by the sanitation workers. Boston's a union town. Docket 1141 is adjourned. At that hearing, I didn't feel like the disability voice or perspective was heard. And it was then that I decided I was going to go back and bring even more people with me to the second hearing.

46:30The second hearing. In July, two city councilors had unveiled a fairly bold anti-Waymo ordinance. The ordinance decreed that any driverless car in Boston had to have a human driver in the driver's seat at all times. And called for a feasibility study of the tech, which would include organized labor, but not the disability community. If passed, functionally, this would be a ban. The plan was to vote on the ordinance after the second hearing, which would take place in October. The driverless car in Boston was on trial. For the record, my name is Gabriela Coletta Zapata, District 1 City Councilor.

47:06and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Government Operations. Today is October 28th, 2025. Chapter 4, A Good Fight. The second hearing would go differently. It would go differently from the beginning. One reason was because of its referee, Presiding Councillor Gabriela Coletta Zapata, who started by trying to establish some ground rules. There will be no demonstration of approval or disapproval or signs. So thank you so much for your understanding. We appreciate you. Again, thank you so much for being here. The union went first, a string of testimonies from all sorts of drivers, many familiar faces from the previous hearing.

47:42And of course, Counselor Julia Mejia was here, dressed today in a jaunty black beret and black glasses. I'm still in shock that I have to even have this conversation, that here we are in this day and age, trying to defend ourselves from robots taking over our jobs, right? And right here, this is the first line of defense, because first they come for the poor jobs, right? You know, I'm always ready for a good fight, so I walked in ready. I'm like, this is one-two punch. I'm going to take them all out this time, you know?

48:14Counselor Mejia, in Spanish, says they start by attacking the poorest, but from there, they keep picking us off. That the city of Boston is not going to let anyone take away the income of its people. No clapping, no clapping. I don't want no problems with this people. Please, no clapping. Por favor, no problem, please. The chair of our hearing made it very clear, we're going to listen to everybody. We're going to take it in the order of testimony. Everybody's going to get three minutes. There are going to be no outbursts. They control the hearing much better. ...your testimony and your contributions.

48:44We're going to transition because we do have a long list to public testimony. So thank you. Thank you so much. After the union had spoken, everyone else who put their names on the list got their chance to talk. So in closing, if you do do a study, look at not only how it would negatively impact people, but look how it would positively impact people. Because to me, autonomous vehicles is not a dystopian future. There's a second side of the story. It's a legitimate side of the story. And I felt like I wasn't going to be alone because I had a lot of people with disabilities in the room with me that day.

49:16There must be more accessible, affordable, and reliable transportation. Carl had done his version of what the unions had done so well in the first round. He summoned his own coalition. Hello, my name is Stephen Yorty. These were people from Best Buddies, an organization for people with intellectual disabilities. They were citizens from Boston's blind community. As a legally blind guide dog user in Boston, I have fewer transportation options than I did 10 years ago. I came from New Hampshire in what I used to call transportation desert, where I only had to rely on my family to help me get back and forth to be able to...

49:51I felt the room had a, almost what I would call a seismic shift. Autonomous vehicles have the potential to give me and other people with disabilities increased independence, mobility, and flexibility. I think Waymo can go where the ride can't go. There was even a mother against drunk driving who spoke on one of the panels, right? Autonomous vehicles represent another important tool in the effort to eliminate impaired driving. I mean, what are you going to say to a mother? You don't have a right to want an autonomous vehicle since your son died? What were you just, like, feeling watching them talk?

50:30So, you know, to be honest with you, at first, I didn't know what I was walking into, like, to be honest. Like, I thought I was going to get more of the last go-round. But the second hearing, they were more strategic. And when I started hearing from some of the disability community members, And, you know, I also felt like it was very, you know, scripted. And I haven't worked in this space to understand how you set up all of your advocates to all be on the same message. So I felt like, hmm, they're all saying the same thing. I've seen this action. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I want to first start off by thanking the public testimony.

51:14I think to my colleague's earlier point is so important. Counselor Mejia, who says what she thinks, told the room that what she thought she'd just seen was a show. A show put on by Waymo. To benefit from that are not the people that we're trying to serve or the people that we're trying to protect. So I just want to name that. That was very poor taste, in my personal, humble opinion. While I think it's important for us to get that on the record, I think what it did is provide... I think the words you used in the hearing is that you said you felt like it was in poor taste. Well, I really did say poor taste.

51:46I did. Oh my God. Everybody needs therapy after they get done with my hearings. Lord have mercy. So yeah, I do believe that they are utilizing the disability community to their advantage. And you don't do that to people. It's wrong. Period. I don't know how to ask this question. It's like slightly delicate, but also I'm... Go for it. If I don't want to answer it, I'll figure it out. I think I'm not worried about it. Like Waymo is not an accessibility company. Like it's not as if they're inventing autonomous vehicles for accessibility reasons. They want to reach a large market. Like accessibility is part of it.

52:33It's also the fact of the accessibility issue and the fact of like disabled people as allies for them is convenient. Like do you? Sure. But so is AARP when they push certain things, right? And they have elderly spokespersons. And yes, it's convenient that the two things align together. And I hear you. And maybe that's a little selfish for Waymo. But I'm going into this knowing what I'm getting into. I know that Waymo is aligning themselves. I'm not going to say using this because I'm not. if you listen to me talk, you can't take advantage of me unless I want to be. Right? So I know what I'm getting into when I present on behalf of autonomous vehicles.

53:24I don't care if they make a profit if it means my mobility, my freedom, and my independence. Okay? There's way more reaching out to the blind community. Yes. Are they perhaps giving donations to the American Council for the Blind? Yes. But the individuals aren't making a dime. The money's going to non-profit organizations. So does that answer your question? Yeah, and I don't. It's like I personally, I feel like it's just a question. I don't feel like I'm being used, if that's what you're getting at. They never said how to testify. They never once told me what to say. They just said, please testify on behalf of autonomous vehicles.

54:12That's all. That's it. Nobody held my hands. Nobody gave me coaching. And to my knowledge, the handful of people that I recruited that testified, none of them got coaching either. So that's Carl's position. Counselor Mejia, though, in the room that day, was very fired up, very focused on the target of her ire. So I just want to name that that was very poor taste to utilize folks who are already vulnerable to fight on behalf of those who have so much more than any of us here. She directed some very strong words at the man sitting across from her, the man in a suit with gray hair. Waymo. And I'll start with the CEO, maybe.

54:54How can we utilize Waymo instead of replacing our app drivers to improve the quality of experiences for those folks who have complained? I think utilizing Waymo in an autonomous vehicle opens the door for elimination of practices, illegal practices of discrimination. No, that's not the question. The question is, right, because you talk about your technology and your ability. Counselor Mejia pressed. She wanted him to answer, how could Waymo create new technology that would improve life for blind people without using driverless cars? App drivers. That's the question. I'm not that technology advanced to answer that question.

55:38But you're the CEO of a technology company. No, I'm not. I'm the president and CEO of the Carroll Center for the Blind. I was going to say, Gary, that I am... It's Greg. Greg, oh my God. So somebody gave me the wrong piece of paper because they got you as the CEO of Waymo and the Greg. My team better get it together. Okay, so let's go back. Let me just stay with you real quick, right? Like, I think there is a - There was a white guy who had on a suit. I just made all types of assumptions. Oh, my God. So he was going on and on about his stuff. And I think I even said his name wrong. I didn't know who he was.

56:16And I felt like, you know how when you have egg in your face? Like, I had to pick up my face and put it back on because I was like, embarrassing. Because you were giving him a hard time. I was giving him a hard time. And then he has to say to you, I don't work for Waymo. I was like, well, okay, then. I'm still mad at you, though. It was embarrassing. I mean, you know what it was? It was like because it sounded like he worked for Waymo because he was there advocating fiercely for that community in ways that made me feel like he was part of their team. So, yeah, I mean, I was like, okay, you're on the other side of this, but you're not really on the other side because you're sitting on the Waymo panel anyway, So you're still part of them.

57:01I think that if I try to sympathize with the feeling Counselor Mejia is expressing here, this is how I understand it. It can be annoying when the other side is a mix of people you're allowed to dismiss out of hand, tech executives, allied with people you're not, disability advocates. And when those advocates are all saying similar things, when it's your people, that sounds like solidarity. When it's them, it can sound phony. It can sound orchestrated.

57:32But the whole reason I'd found this fight so fascinating is because I thought it was one where you really couldn't easily dismiss anybody. For the people who believe driverless cars will save lots of lives, the human beings with jobs are an unignorable fact. For the people who want to protect those jobs, the human beings asking for better accessibility or safer roads are also an unignorable fact. This fantasy that there were blind people who were secret lobbyists was tempting because if that were true, it would mean the world was a simpler place. It's not. The chair, Councillor Coletta Zapata, said this in the room pretty explicitly.

58:15Nobody had been paid to be there. But I think for the advocates that have been here and that have provided public testimony, especially maybe from on those in favor of this I think it's important to say that everybody has their own individual agency and they were here on their own accord. Counselor Coletta Zapata you can see her in the video shoulder length brown hair, big clear glasses. Like Counselor Mejia she comes from an activist background. As the hearing closed that day she'd gone from being just the neutral moderator to when it was her turn asking the Waymo executive a lot of questions.

58:49Questions about jobs, but also just questions about the car. How did it work? What happened when a blind person ordered one? How did they find it? She seemed to be using the hearing to try to get information, which is how I'd been trying to use the hearing. And I wondered if her experience as a participant had been at all like mine as an observer. Can I just tell you, and I don't know if this is a question or just like a statement, when I was watching the hearings, the thing that was annoying to me was like, I felt like on Waymo's side, they were unwilling to engage with the reality of job loss.

59:21But on the AppDrivers Union side, I found myself being annoyed because I didn't see them engaging with the question of safety. The idea that these cars could prevent death or that they could be good for disabled people. It was like neither side wanted to, they just kept skipping what to me felt like the core trade-offs here when you talk about this could be really good or this could be really bad. Yeah, I saw that too. And it's my job, it's all of our jobs as folks that are trying to be thoughtful and take a comprehensive approach to listen to every side. And that will require a lot of compromise and a lot of consensus, but I think that that's good policymaking.

1:00:01What do you feel like you need, like if you had a magic wand to just get exactly the information you want to have to be able to make a decision about whether autonomous vehicles are right for Boston, what's the data you'd want to see? I love the magic wand question. Because it always talks about like the possibility of getting to a place where everybody's happy, which I don't think is ever going to happen. But I would be happy to get more data of if we could, if I had a magic wand, how many folks would this employ? How many folks would ultimately lose their job? And what would be the exact number of potential crashes or safety incidences on behalf of Waymo?

1:00:41And how does that stack up to the existing safety and traffic instances that are already happening in the city of Boston? I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot. And yeah, how much money is Waymo going to make off of this? Because I think that's a central question to, okay, is one company is going to benefit? and then there could be hundreds of, potentially hundreds of workers that are out of a job and what that means for our local economy. And so it behooves us as legislators to ask these difficult questions and to challenge not just these major corporations, but challenge labor unions and to challenge advocacy organizations and to try not to get motivated by our passions.

1:01:24This was the only time in Boston I really heard anyone say this, that to get to a good answer, every single side would need to be challenged, that finding a solution would mean refusing to offer any group blanket deference. I'd now heard the 20-year story of these cars, I'd read the safety data, and I'd done my best in Boston to just listen. In general, I wasn't very satisfied with what I'd heard, but I appreciated Counselor Coletta Zapata's prescription, that everyone tried to calm their passions, to ask good questions. And Counselor Mejia, for her part, said that she would like to bring all stakeholders to the table, including disability activists.

1:02:00Emily and I left Boston. As we zipped down I-95 in a human-driven car, talking about what we'd seen, here's where things stood back in Beantown. At the end of the second hearing, the city council had chosen not to vote on the ordinance, the functional Waymo ban that many of the councillors had spent eight hours speaking in full-throated support of. It seemed possible they'd noticed that passing an ordinance that so thoroughly excluded the disability community was not politically wise. The decision on Waymo now seems to be moving to the state level. There, we now have competing bills. One that would approve driverless cars, the other that would require a human being behind the wheel at all times.

1:02:40Essentially a ban. Driving home, I had a realization about what we'd seen there. Emily and I had sat for days with different people who all believed they'd glimpsed a vision of the future. Abdi Aziz had a vision of Waymo finishing what Uber had started. taking the market for itself. Carl had a vision of a future where he drove again, to the beach with his wife. Counselor Mejia had an ominous vision, where her neighborhood was empty, the people all replaced by machines. Everybody was here in the present, fighting for, fighting against, a movie playing in their minds. Here's the vision I see. I started to glimpse it in a conversation with reporter Timothy B.

1:03:22Lee. We were talking about the future. He was describing his vision of how things are about to change. He pointed out how today, if a robot driver makes a mistake, footage goes viral online. But someday soon, he imagines we'll be in a situation where the clips that go viral will be of human beings doing the kinds of things on the road that today we just tolerate. Like, can you believe this maniac is still allowed to drive? I do think that society's tolerance for bad driving is going to go down. So there's been this trend over the last few decades where the amount of training you need as a teenager to get a driver's license has been going up.

1:03:56I think that'll continue to go up. And if somebody's caught drunk driving, we're pretty reluctant to take the driver's license away because their livelihood might depend on it. But once driverless taxes are cheap or once you can buy a driverless vehicle, a judge might be much more comfortable saying like the penalty for your first instance of drunk driving is a lifetime ban on driving a car. Like you can have a driverless car that takes it wherever you want, but you just can't get behind the wheel.

1:04:21In Timothy's vision, change comes fast. In about five years, driverless cars are as common as Uber's today. In around 10 years, every new car standard just has a Waymo package. A robot driver and sensors, a button you can press if you don't want to drive. I shared Timothy's vision. I believe driverless cars will soon be everywhere. Not even just because they're safer, but because of consumer demand. The same force that broke the politicians who resisted Uber not long ago. A lot of AI is like this. Technology too useful to ignore, even if it causes social pain. If we're going to be okay, we're going to need to envision some new futures.

1:05:03New compromises. New ways to share the dividends of progress with the people it displaces. There are precedents for this. When containerization put a ton of longshoremen out of work in the 1960s, the West Coast Union negotiated a deal. The employers could bring in the new machines, but they had to pay into a fund that guaranteed the existing workforce wouldn't be laid off and give early retirement payouts to workers whose jobs disappeared. You could do something like that. You could do a lot of things. But whatever we're going to do, I did not find the seeds of that new compromise in Boston. It also does not exist in D.C., which has been delaying driverless cars with bureaucratic hurdles.

1:05:44Or in New York, where my governor talked briefly about allowing driverless cars, then retreated under pressure.

1:05:54But these are the places where a bargain could likely be struck. These are where drivers, Democrats, and Teamsters have, for a few more years at least, leverage. They should use it. But they'll have to be inventive. They'll have to imagine visions of the future more vivid than the word no. Thank you.

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1:10:07Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Truthy Pinnimanini. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian, who just did a fantastic job on the music in these two episodes, if I can say that. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. This episode was fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schott.

1:10:40Special thanks to Kim Kupel, Alfred Potter, Omar Afsemi, Isabel Urbano, Erica Knoll, Alejandro Torero, and all the folks at the Boston SEIU office, plus Anthony Perez, Matt Schumwinger, Alex Roy, Karen Levy, Henry, Donna, and the many other Uber drivers we bugged for this story. If you would like to support reporting like the reporting in these two episodes, plus get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode at searchengine.show. It's how we keep this thing running. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.

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