” ‘There is nobody behind the driver’s seat at all — in fact, often there’s nobody in the car at all, and it’s driving to pick somebody up,’ says Andrew Chatham, senior director of commercialization, scale, and infrastructure at Waymo. He spoke with ABC Audio in LA for a new exhibit at the famed Petersen Automotive Museum highlighting the story of Waymo.
‘So we use a variety of sensors on the car. There’s cameras, there’s radars and lidar — which is a laser range finding system. We take all that information, we look 360 degrees around us, multiple times a second, and we drive,’ says Chatham.
And Waymo claims driving in one of their cars with the computers doing the work – accelerating, braking, stopping, and changing lanes – is actually safer than driving with a human behind the wheel.
“It’s very clear that it is ready for the streets — we’ve seen from statistics that it is safer than human drivers, so if you’re comfortable with those, you should be pretty comfortable with Waymo,” says Chatham. ‘Even more comfortable.’
But not everyone is comfortable.
‘We’ve heard of these cars shutting down when they lose cell service, traffic being backed up, they don’t know how to maneuver through more, you know, winding roads. Blocking emergency vehicles. And also there’s an aspect of jobs being lost,’ says Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez.
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But Councilmember Soto-Martinez has another issue: driverless taxis could mean a human is out of a job.
‘It’s definitely taking jobs right now. I mean, there are autonomous vehicles driving folks around with the many issues,’ he says. ‘In my community, those jobs are often done by people who just arrived in this country. … If that’s going to be outsourced to an autonomous vehicle that is gonna cause all these safety concerns, I have big issues with that.’
Jain says history would show technology always takes jobs, and that jobs change over time.
‘Eventually there is some adjustment in the labor market. People find other kinds of jobs, and start to do more interesting jobs than I guess, driving cars around,’ says Jain.
Chatham says while nobody is driving the cars, plenty of people are working at Waymo.
‘Waymo’s provided a lot of jobs. We’ve do use several human beings to run the service, we have people operating the depots, we have people working in desk-based jobs. I’m employed by Waymo,’ says Chatham.
‘And I think it’s also easy to forget that people spend a lot of their time just sitting in traffic, beholden to the steering wheel that they’re sitting behind. And they can free up that time, and make people productive. That is time back in people’s lives,’ he adds.”
-Stone, A., & Dobuski, M. (2024, September 2). Waymo takes to the streets in more cities. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/waymo-takes-streets-cities/story?id=113248606
It’s incredible that this technology is already so developed! This technology is extremely impressive. It would be awesome to improve road safety by eliminating human error in driving. However, this becomes an issue when we consider those who currently work as rideshare drivers for Uber, Lyft, etc. Often, rideshare drivers are immigrants who recently moved to the United States, and English is not their first language. “…many immigrants are attracted to driving platforms as they have a low barrier to entry with quick hiring. Drivers don’t need strong English proficiency; they just need a driver’s license and a car to start” (Sheidlower, n.d.). Automating taxis would take jobs away from this group of people. While Waymo argues that jobs at Waymo would balance this, they fail to recognize that they would likely not hire these same immigrants to work at their company. It becomes a class issue when low-income immigrants have their jobs replaced by robotic taxis that will be serviced by those who have a United States education, documentation, English proficiency, and experience learning and working in tech.
It’s important to recognize that every advancement in design has unintended consequences, and often those consequences affect the least privileged groups in society.
-Sheidlower, N. (n.d.). Gig work is the new Ellis Island for immigrants looking for work. but many drivers feel trapped in the long hours and low pay. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-florida-miami-fort-lauderdale-immigration-rideshare-driving-cuba-2024-5#:~:text=Immigrants%20nationwide%20are%20relying%20heavily,longer%20hours%20for%20low%20pay.
