Stephen Dubner

In Timothy's vision, change comes fast.

In about five years, driverless cars are as common as Ubers 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, new 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.

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

But 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.

That again was PJ Vogt and a special two-part feed drop from the Search Engine podcast.