PJ Vogt

You see them in videos on social media.

A Waymo gets stuck at a dead stoplight or blocks an emergency vehicle.

Or an example Timothy gave, Waymos were driving past stopped school buses in Austin.

Timothy pointed to one area where Waymo's not been as transparent as he'd like.

Those human response agents, some of which are based here, some in the Philippines, there's questions about what specifically they do and about how this will all work as Waymo scales up.

We asked Waymo for comment on everything you heard in this episode, especially the recent safety incidents.

A spokesperson said that the data to date indicates that the Waymo driver is already making roads safer in the places where they operate and says that Waymo continues to work with policymakers and regulators to improve its technology.

That's the safety picture so far, which to me, after many months of looking at this and talking to experts, looks pretty good.

As Waymo continues its rollout, other companies are quickly falling behind.

There's other robo-taxi companies like Amazon Zoox.

Uber is back in the mix, not making technology, but partnering with these robo-taxi companies.

And many of those early Waymo engineers are now CEOs of autonomous companies themselves.

Dimitri Dolgov is actually co-CEO at Waymo, but other team members run driverless trucking companies.

Don Burnett is head of Kodiak AI, which has its technology deployed in driverless trucks in the Permian Basin.

Chris Urmson now heads Aurora, which currently has semi-trucks on Texas highways.

And my personal favorite plot development, which just emerged this week.

They say there's no second axe in American lives.

Somehow, both of these men seem to be on their fourth.

The big picture, though, is that everywhere in America today that you see a driver, taxi, truck, food delivery, there are several companies working on the robot version, trying their best to make driver, as a job, start to go the way of the knocker-upper, of the lamplighter.

Those knocker-uppers, by the way, they disappeared quietly.