Andrew Miller

We did.

So we can approach this from the micro or the macro level.

At the macro level, 40,000 Americans die every year in road incidents.

And that is only those who die.

It excludes those who suffer life-altering injuries.

None of those need to happen.

And the vast, vast majority of those are caused by driver error.

So at scale, the more automated driving there is, the safer the roads are, the safer Americans are, the safer anyone who uses the roads are.

But at a micro level, not just safety matters.

Driving is an immense consumer of people's attention.

They have to give, or they should give, their full attention to the road.

If they don't, we get more of those road incidents that I was describing.

But what it allows you to do is it unlocks vast reservoirs of attention, hundreds of millions of hours every year that Americans would get back for driving.

Other things.

As a good liberal, I don't prescribe a vision of the good life, whether they want to play Candy Crush or whether they want to read the New York Times.

There's any number of things that they could do, but they can't right now because they must pay attention to the road.

It will be a huge liberation of time and attention, which can lead to so many good things.

I like to – it's not so much a joke, it's a wry observation – that around this time last year, I could name every city that Waymo is operating in from memory, because there were so few.

sometime late last summer, and that stopped being true.

I believe they've announced plans to be in more than 15 cities.