I was on my way back from picking up groceries when it caught my eye.
It was a golden car, a little stumpy and awkwardly proportioned, as if an otherwise sleek sedan had been compressed front to back. The golden wheel covers gave it a cartoonish appearance, as if the wheels were wildly outsided. As I sat stopped at a traffic light, this peculiar car crossed in front of me, turning left. The driver, a young casually dressed Black man, was sitting in the driver's seat, looking down at a tablet. Not once did he bother to look up.
His inattention to his driving didn't matter or alarm me, because I recognized the car. It was a self-driving Cybercab, the latest product from Tesla. They're being beta-tested now in a number of metropolitan areas, and might be on our streets by next year. The final version will lack a couple of things we generally expect in a car: 1) A steering wheel and 2) Pedals. They'll be hailable through a Tesla Robotaxi app, which will send a robot car to your house to drive you wherever you wish to go. Or perhaps they'll just be your car, given that the regulatory environment now is a little spotty.
Full Self Driving is actually fairly sophisticated, and given the startling incompetence of many human drivers, I'm not quite as alarmed about the prospect of machine mind driver safety as some. With that said, the reason I love driving is the act of driving, and the idea of cars that require no meaningful engagement or input from me just feels drab and joyless. Yay. More time to stare at our phones.
More on my mind is this: there are roughly two million Americans who rely on ridesharing or taxi-driving for their livelihoods. Tesla's stated goal is to produce two million of these gleaming bot-taxis every single year, doing to ride sharing what ride sharing did to cab-driving.
Back in the day, I drove a Falls Church Yellow Cab for a while, having gone through the relatively demanding process of getting my golden Fairfax county "hacker's" license. Note: this was before GPS, before cell phones, back when you found your way to pick up a fare by reading a map. Was it the best job ever? It was not. But it paid the bills for a season.
Normally, I'm psyched when I encounter a new car, particularly one that's...for now...rare. It's like seeing your first Model T, or your first VW Bug.
But as the quants, tech-bros, and equity-class come up with more and more ways to take work away from us, while their faux-moralist political enablers hypocritically curse the unemployed for their laziness, this brazen AI chariot arrives like an ill and gilded wind.
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