In the beginning, God created Man and Man created cities. And from these cities sprang forth a service to cart Man around: the taxi. And it was good. So good that, over centuries, it barely changed. Visitors to ancient Rome could hail a cisium. In 17th-century France, they could take a fiacre. And 19th-century England had the hackney coach. Automobiles eventually replaced horse-drawn carriages, but other than that, the experience remained the same: Passengers hailed a driver who would help them load their luggage and perhaps make small talk about the city while ferrying them to their destination.
Then, in 2009, Man made the ride-share app. And it was very good. Many of the nuisances of taxis that had seemed unavoidable were eliminated overnight. Waiting in the cold with your hand in the air scanning for available cabs? Drivers refusing to take you somewhere after you’d already gotten in their vehicle? Cabs refusing to stop because of your race? Losing items, never to see them again? All problems that were gladly ushered into the past. The act of schlepping around a city was changed forever.
Ride-sharing has its own flaws: surge pricing in inclement weather, incessant rate hikes, late or canceled rides. But in all of the ways I’ve imagined improving upon the modern taxi, eliminating drivers themselves has never crossed my mind. And yet, the powerful minds of Silicon Valley and the investors who fund them are trying to do just that.
Earlier this year, Tesla, which already has a driverless-taxi service, announced that its Gigafactory in Texas would begin producing robotaxis devoid of steering wheels or pedals. Waymo, the Alphabet-owned driverless-taxi service that launched commercially in 2020, recently raised $16 billion, and plans to expand into more than 20 cities. In November, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Waymos were already operating, started allowing the vehicles to travel on highways and to certain airports. Waymo now has its sights set on America’s taxi mecca: New York City.
The pitch for driverless taxis follows the familiar contours of many of Silicon Valley’s recent technological advances: We should all be excited about a “dream” from the future finally being realized. The thrill of inevitable progress! A safer, easier tomorrow!
Driverless taxis are the next step toward tech’s hopes for broad adoption of driverless cars in general. Uri Levine, a co-founder of Waze, predicts that Generation Beta will not drive. “A generation after that,” he told Business Insider, if you tell a young person “that you used to drive cars yourself, they will not believe you.” One of the arguments for self-driving cars is that they would be free of the human errors that lead to crashes. “It’s going to be such a great technology,” Sebastian Thrun, the roboticist and former head of Google’s self-driving project, said recently. “Think of the 1.2 million lives we lose each year (to car crashes), mostly because they’re not paying attention. Think if we could get some of those lives back.”
That number is correct. But that figure is global, and more than 90 percent of the fatalities occur in low- and middle-income countries (ones that are not part of Waymo’s or Tesla’s expansion plans). Trade organizations such as the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which advocates for “the safe and timely deployment of autonomous driving technology,” insist that driverless cars will save lives. But groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists are more skeptical, pointing out that “studies have shown that automated vehicles are less able to detect people of color and children.” They also worry that the cars could “displace millions of people employed as drivers, negatively impact public transportation funding, and perpetuate the current transportation system’s injustices.”
More certain than safety are profits. When companies talk about safety, it’s not just because they care about people, but because they want to sell their product. Self-driving cars are projected to be an $87 billion industry by 2030. And the robotic “passenger economy,” which includes driverless taxis and robot deliveries, could generate as much as $7 trillion by 2050.
Chances are slim that the average American will benefit much financially from any of that money. But we will lose something, as Big Tech yet again destroys human interaction and calls it “convenience.”
Most of us live in silos, clustered together with people whose jobs, educations, incomes, languages, and faiths are similar to or the same as our own. We have few occasions to brush against other ways of living, few ways to interact with people of different backgrounds. These moments are meaningful and rare, and the taxi cab is one place where they regularly happen.
Every new city that I visit comes with a personalized introduction from a taxi driver. Like the guy who used to do stunts in Hollywood and now has to pick up shifts driving cabs who regaled me with tales of stars and action movies in a more flush time in Los Angeles. Or the 60-something Navy vet who took up driving after his restaurants closed during the pandemic. He drove me to the airport in Pittsburgh and told me about having recently connected with a son he never knew he had, who’d found him on Ancestry.com. Or the young driver from Pakistan who was nervously preparing for his upcoming wedding. He got some free advice, as well as a nice tip.
Many of these drivers are immigrants. Many are people whom the economy has left behind—people who started driving to supplement day jobs and struggling businesses, or because they’re juggling caregiving responsibilities. Perhaps, Big Tech thinks that riders won’t miss them when they’re gone. Drivers can be annoying. They can talk too much. They can play music you don’t like. But they can also be generous and kind and surprising. Human interaction, imperfect as it is, is what makes us human.
And maybe that’s the problem for the titans of Silicon Valley. Compared with robots, humans take a lot of effort. “I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said recently. Artisan, an AI start-up, advertises its services with the explicit slogan “Stop Hiring Humans.” We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated.
Do we want these people dictating profound changes in our society? Technology advances, in part, because a small number of entrepreneurs or scientists get really hyped about something, and another small number of investors gets even more hyped about the massive financial opportunities that development represents. But the rest of us do have a say: We have a choice as to whether we want to adopt that technology or not. We can consider our preferences, and the long-term societal implications. We can resist the old-fashioned corporate greed that gets wrapped in the language of pro-humanistic societal advancement and care.
For two decades, I have watched us blindly fall for one sales pitch after another. Every app and advancement comes shrouded in promises of “progress” and “connectivity” and “convenience.” And in many early cases—such as the invention of ride-sharing apps—Silicon Valley truly did deliver a better mousetrap. But we’re getting diminishing returns. We are living in Silicon Valley’s future now, and we are lonelier, more anxious, and more polarized than ever before. Are the mousetraps better? Safer? Who knows. But the mice inside are miserable.