I recently went to San Francisco for a work trip and Waymo’s were everywhere in SOMA.
I tried them out twice. Both times were after dinner back to the hotel I was staying at, traffic was heavy but weather was your normal bay area weather, 60 and clear.
They worked fine, picked me up, dropped me off, navigated without issue even on some of the more challenging streets. Seemed expensive, $20-25 to go 1-1.5 miles, but I only needed two rides while there and used it both times so maybe that’s competitive or even a good deal compared to uber.
I think the thing that struck me most though was the first trip. A very cheerful robotic voice explained how Waymo worked, the car was almost impossibly clean like no one had ever been in it, the music was some pleasant background music with a cover art that was some swirl of colors. I started thinking about how every part of this experience is aritificial. The voice greeting me, the, probably ai generated, music and album art, the driving robot.
I’ve worked in startups for 20 years now, building little companies into big companies all with missions to change the world for the better in some way or another. That was the Silicon Valley vibe when I got there in the late 2000s, the dot com bust was over and VC was flowing and people were building stuff.
Waymo is interesting because as a service it did exactly what I wanted, got me from the restaurant back to the hotel room to sleep because my jet lagged Ohio brain thought it was 1am. It was clean, efficient, and pleasant. Although the pleasant had this odd feeling of not so much pleasant as designed to be unoffensive.
It was a weird little peek into a potential future, and I can’t say it was bad but it definitely felt different.
On my ride home from the airport back in Ohio I took an uber and the driver was an older gentleman who happened to live the next town over. We chatted, he told me about his ex job as a chemical engineer at a plant that exploded, his ex wife who was an amazing gardener and also a former junkie, we passed a gas station and he let me know that it was run by a father and son who always did right by him and that’s where I should take me car.
I’m not one for chatting most times, I’m not very social. The proximity of the two experiences though showed me the stark difference. I can’t really say an elderly man being forced to do gig work to make ends meet after a colorful life is a particularly good future either.
I feel like I might have been building to some sort of point, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe just wanted to share some random thoughts that recently popped up. I get the appeal of Waymo. I think if you rolled it out everywhere and it worked as well as I experienced and was a reasonable price it would dominate. I’m also not sure if I’d want it to, but it seems that the future has a way of happening with or without our consent.