Andrew Miller

Which leads to 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.

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.

This is an obvious place where 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.

So 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.

The 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.