Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, Hard Fork listeners, friends of the show. Loyal forkers, enemies of the show, rivals, nemeses. We are getting geared up for Hard Fork Live in just a week and a half. It's going to be a great show, and we're so excited to see so many of you there. We will be bringing you all of that fun in the podcast feed, so stay tuned for that.
But this week, we are off, and we're bringing you a conversation about the shift to driverless cars, one of our favorite topics. This is an episode of the podcast Interesting Times, hosted by Ross Douthat, and it is called Why Are We Still Driving?, Ross talks with Andrew Miller, who writes about transportation policy and the future of self-driving cars.
I found this a really enjoyable conversation. I learned a lot from it, and I hope you enjoy this. We'll be back in your feed soon with a bunch of interviews and shenanigans from Hard Fork Live. Yeah. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to go paint those sets. Are we painting the sets? I thought we had someone for that. No. Budget cuts. We spent all the budget on your wardrobe.
We did.
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. It feels like we've been hearing about self-driving cars for a long time. But now they're really here, ferrying people to work and school and nightlife from Los Angeles to Nashville, and poised to spread to just about every big city in America.
My guest this week is very optimistic about a future where the cars take over. He writes about self-driving automobiles and transportation policy on his substack, Changing Lanes. And he's the co-author of a recent book with the stark title, The End of Driving. We talked about the potential benefits of this transformation.
And as someone who kind of loves the open road, I pressed him on what's lost in freedom and mastery and the very birthright of Americans if we don't have to be in the driver's seat anymore. Andrew Miller, welcome to Interesting Times. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So I want you to start by giving me a sales pitch for self-driving cars. Explain why people might welcome them.
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Chapter 2: What are the potential benefits of driverless cars?
Well, now you get into an interesting question because there's two schools of thought. There is the transport planning professionals school, and then there's everybody else's school, the average American school. The transport planning professional says, look, roads are fixed, finite space. There's only so many cars that can fit them. This is an asset we have to use efficiently.
Therefore, we should have shared vehicles, just like we get 20 people on a bus. We should have multiple people in every robo-taxi or shuttle bus. You'll get more use of that road. Everyone will have more efficient trips. And then the average American says, go pound sand. I like being alone. I like my privacy. I don't want to share my space with strangers.
I'm going to be in a robotaxi alone, and if you won't let me do that, then I will buy my own car, and it can drive me around. So the question is how we thread that needle between what a planning future of efficient use and the overwhelming revealed preference.
Again, in this extremely hypothetical and contingent timeline... when is it normal for people to have their own self-driving car available for purchase? That's not part of a taxi fleet. You just are going, you're just like, I'm going to buy a car. And of course, it's going to be a self-driving car because why wouldn't I want that capacity?
The trick there is liability. You can imagine a world where Tesla's going all in on complete self-driving, but the conventional automakers, your VWs and your Fords, particularly your GMs, they would love for you to have every year that driving assist gets more and more sophisticated. The steering wheel never goes away, but it can handle more and more of your daily driving until... Yeah.
In 10, 12 years, you could imagine if we solve the liability issue, it can be doing your driving almost all the time. There's no reason a privately owned vehicle, if you're willing to pay for it, can't have all of these sensor systems to make it work. And if Waymo leads the charge and makes LIDAR rigs incredibly cheap, everyone's going to pile on that.
What level of self-driving is available in Teslas right now?
So I drive a Tesla personally. You hear a lot about these levels, level three, level four, level five. I think that that sort of language is misleading. All you need to understand about self-driving is does it require a human to be actively monitoring the situation or does it not?
Right. You get in the backseat and it goes.
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Chapter 3: How could driverless cars change road safety?
So we learned about this because Waymo was called to the Senate to testify. So we got an inside look at this.
Are all of these human operators located in the United States? Are they all here? No, we have some in the U.S. and some abroad. So how does that break down? What percent are abroad? Senator, I don't have that number for you. We can get back to you. Is it a majority who are abroad? I just don't have that number. Well, that's very curious.
Waymo says that what they have is remote assistance. So what that means is that it is not like someone playing a video game where they've got a fake steering wheel in front of them and they jack into the car and then drive it and then jack out and the car computer takes over. It's more like laying digital breadcrumbs. The car isn't sure what to do.
It encounters a situation that is confusing to it because there's a bunch of traffic cones, but a few of them are knocked over and that's sufficiently unusual that the car is not uncertain. So it calls a human remote assistant who looks at it and says, oh, it's safe to proceed. Just don't knock over that cone. Or even goes so far as to say, here is, I can see on your map, go to point A.
then go to point B, then go to point C, and at point C, you will no longer be confused. That's what they call remote assistance. So is that driving? People have differences of opinions on this. I say it's not. I say that the remote assistance is what it says it is. It's a human providing additional input to the computer to make its decisions.
But yeah, there are cases where the computer cannot figure it out on its own and it does need help.
And the human in that situation, just to make the case that this is something more like driving, has the capacity to direct the car.
Yes. It's giving an instruction to the computer.
Right. What is the passenger's capacity to affect what the self-driving car does? Once you've bought your fare, it's taking you, you know, to Fisherman's Wharf or something, and you think it's doing something wrong as the passenger. Is there anything you can do? Can you stop the car? Sure.
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Chapter 4: What are the cultural implications of giving up driving?
We're going to insist upon it.
But this is a pretty radically different setup than the entire liability setup we have right now.
Yeah. Liability is tricky. The American liability is based on the idea that no consumer can hope to stand up to a big company. So we put all of the weight in legal proceedings on the customer side. And that's led to a jurisprudential culture, if I can use that word, where the cost of getting anything wrong from a manufacturer's side is vast. It's existentially vast.
So I told you earlier that there were three big companies in this space. There's Waymo, there's Zoox, and there's Tesla. There used to be a fourth. It was called Cruise, and it was an arm of General Motors. So it was involved in an accident a few years ago where someone hit someone who was jaywalking, and they threw the human jaywalker into the path of a cruise vehicle, which ran them over.
And then the cruise vehicle, because it didn't know what to do, it moved to the safe position. It pulled to the stop, dragging that poor, unfortunate soul with them. And they weren't killed, but they were severely injured.
So their injury was much worse because the car did the extra thing.
Yeah, a human driver would never have made that mistake.
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Chapter 5: How can we balance technology with the need for human agency?
A human driver might have hit the person, but wouldn't have dragged them.
Yeah. A responsible human driver, I think, would absolutely have hit them, but would have known there was a human under the car and would have stayed put. But the car didn't have a sensor underneath, and by dragging that person exacerbated their injuries. That incident ended up killing the company.
It was not just the lawsuit, but they were a bit squirrely with the regulators who removed their license to operate. And General Motors said, we can't fund this anymore. So it all got shut down. One incident. So I understand why the firms are being very gun-shy of assuming liability here. But we need to insist upon it.
But does that mean that essentially you have to achieve not just a higher level of safety than a human driver, but some extraordinarily higher level because you will be liable in the way that a normal auto manufacturer wouldn't be?
So because this is a new technology, regulators are absolutely holding a self-driving car to a much higher standard than a human-piloted or a human-operated car. Some people find that obnoxious. It's like you'd save lives on net. As soon as it's better than average, let it rip because you'd be saving lives on net. That's not how lawmakers think.
They don't think about, like, how do we get the best outcomes on net? We get... situation of like, no one can be blamed. So they insist that it's got to be as safe as reasonably possible, like what an engineer calls six nines, 99.9999. I don't think that's an unreasonable standard. Sure, it's going to slow down reaching scale with these things, but there is so much
distrust of big tech and of self-driving cars generally, I think that the appropriate strategy of going slow, being safe, and showing that you're not harmful and you're not cavalier is so important if we're going to get the good outcomes that I think this technology can give us.
So in practice, how many people could a self-driving fleet kill to be viable, would you say? Is it like 1%?
Well, and it's important to note that one cruise incident, and that was a severe injury. It wasn't a death.
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Chapter 6: What challenges do self-driving cars face in bad weather?
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 then how does the sale happen? When we started this conversation, you made a very strong case that... There's these huge benefits in terms of just a much, much safer road. Yeah. But that accumulates slowly and in patchwork and you don't have the data for a while or a long time. Most people don't get into car accidents as a regular thing.
As many car accidents as there are in the US, most people go through a year or five years without getting in one. Right. So. How do you as an advocate for this technology or some version of this technology see it getting over the hump of different forms of public resistance?
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. So the more people that get to ride even once, the spell will be broken, and we'll see, of course, this is driving something a machine should be good at.
Why shouldn't I have a machine do it? And that's a world, as you've alluded to, which will be safer, but it requires us to be comfortable with it. So I hope that everyone listening to this podcast, the next time they are perhaps traveling for business or pleasure in a city where Waymo or Zoox or Tesla is operating, tries it out.
And I think they will see that this is, like they say about other AI, just another technology, a normal, boring technology.
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Chapter 7: How do Tesla and Waymo differ in their self-driving technology?
Workers, they're going to want tools to carry from the job. They're going to want their own vehicle to do that. The objective is not a world where no one doesn't That's just where you don't need to own as many as you do now.
How is it sustainable, though, to have that sort of persistent private car ownership if self-driving is so much safer than regular driving? Like we talked earlier about the challenge of liability and how figuring out liability works. is how you figure this out.
But isn't there a certain point where that issue flips and everyone looks around and says, my God, a Waymo is a thousand times safer than Ross Douthat behind the wheel of a Toyota Sienna. Terror of, you know, greater New Haven. And therefore, my insurance premiums for owning a Toyota Sienna that I need to fill with, you know, gear for my oversized family go up and up and up and effectively...
non-self-driving starts getting priced out. Isn't that a plausible corollary of your optimistic for self-driving future?
I think it is a plausible corollary. I don't think it's in the near or even the medium term, but this century, assuming we don't have some sort of catastrophe, could that happen? Absolutely, it could. But I think it would be so gradual because Tesla's ambitions aside, I think private cars are going to have steering wheels for decades to come.
They're just going to have sophisticated driver assist systems or even self-driving, but only in cars. Like, only on the highway or only during the day. I think what will happen is, is that you will be expected to use such systems when you can.
And if you choose not to and you get an accident, your insurance might say, well, our policy says that you have to rely on the systems in situations where it's appropriate. Right. So it's not going to go away overnight. It'll be incremental. And I still think that's to the good as those systems get better and better.
Once it reaches a point where it can drive better than us in all scenarios, why wouldn't we want that?
Let's talk about that. Do you like to drive?
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Chapter 8: What is the future of self-driving cars in suburban areas?
You're also moving this thing, and so you have to pay attention. You've got to have good reflexes. These are valuable things. And yeah, we are on track to see them, probably not in our lifetimes, but sometimes in this century, we're on track to see them disappear or become very minor.
The driver's license as right of passage phenomenon has already weakened in parts of the United States. And, you know, it's sort of a famous part of the larger story of American teenagers being more risk averse and, you know, going around less in the age of the iPhone, right? That teens are more likely to postpone getting their license, right? That's already... diminished to some degree.
So you can sort of fold this story into the larger story of the kind of safety-focused screenification of American youth.
And bigger than that, the death of embodied knowledge, where it's not just screenification. It's like, I'm a writer, which means I spend most of my time looking at a screen and writing. I'm not working with my hands. But that's the trend not just of youth. That's the trend of American life, right? So we need to solve this somehow, but it shouldn't be regarded as the special burden of
our cars to solve it for us. We need rites of passage. We need more opportunities to live in our bodies and learn embodied skills. But let's not say that we're going to draw the line at driving cars. That seems the wrong place to draw it when they can offer us so many offsetting benefits.
But what is the right place to draw it? It just seems like... People are going to say that about every step along the road to disembodied existence, right? Because at every stage, you're going to say, well, this new situation is much more efficient. It's much safer. You don't want your kid to die in a car accident. Obviously, I don't want my kid to die in a car accident, right?
But that sales pitch is going to be true for any form of embodied knowledge, right? Doesn't embodied knowledge by its nature contain risk and peril? Isn't that what embodiment is all about?
It absolutely is. And all I can say is if we want driving to make us have full and healthy relationships to the world and to ourselves, I think we're asking too much of driving. You asked me where we should draw the line. I have to say I'm not a minister and I'm not a philosopher, so I can't tell you that.
All I can tell you is that if we have a tool that can save lives while also giving people their time back, I think we would be a fool not to pick it up and then use that time and money we save to invest that into solving this problem.
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