On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Nathan Herrara was deciding how to get around the city to enjoy some essential San Francisco experiences, stopping off in iconic Japantown and visiting the museums inside Golden Gate Park.
The Boston resident said he doesn’t use ride-sharing services much at home, relying instead on his own car to get around the city, but after a bad experience with an Uber driver, he wanted to try out a very Silicon Valley-style form of transportation with Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving taxi service.
Herrara, who describes himself as a technology enthusiast, was very impressed.
“The ride is great and I don’t feel unsafe,” he said, adding that he has absolute confidence in the robot drivers over humans. “They’re more careful.”
By “they,” he means Waymo’s lidar-powered vehicles, which it has spent years navigating local and federal regulatory hurdles to get to work. The company is currently testing autonomous vehicles in Austin and has a waiting list for them in Los Angeles. The service became available in parts of Phoenix in 2020.
After a years-long waiting list, Waymo has finally opened to the public in San Francisco, adding to the city’s diverse options, which range from a vast public transit network to traditional taxis and ride-hailing services led by Uber and Lyft.
Herrera said it was obvious to him to choose Waymo over other options: It’s cleaner, more private, and safer in his experience. He recalled a time when an Uber driver got into an accident after following too closely the car in front of him.
“It always worries me,” he said, noting that roads can be icy in his hometown and in Toronto, where he often travels for business. “I always worry about what their driving record is doing in those conditions.”
Waymo’s robotaxis are one of the 21st century’s most visible examples of automation acting as service workers rather than hiding behind a factory assembly line. Today they’ll drive you to work, and tomorrow they might cook and serve your lunch. Whether customers like it or not, some experts predict that humanoid robots will be around for the next decade.
Waymo’s tagline is “The future is now.”
The Rise of the Robots
Until the recent emergence of AI tools like ChatGPT, robots providing direct services for humans were primarily the stuff of science fiction (think Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons).
The first big example was elevator operation: Until about the 1950s, human elevator operators controlled the speed and direction of elevator cars, but in 1945, an elevator operators strike in New York City helped spark the widespread adoption of automation.
Karl Benedikt Frey, an economist at the University of Oxford, draws parallels between this and the recent rise in use of self-driving taxis: Elevator users initially had the same safety concerns we now hear about self-driving cars.
“People were very concerned about not having anyone directly in charge of their safety,” Frey said.
But over time, people have become more reassured as studies have shown that self-driving vehicles are actually safer and less prone to error than their human-driven counterparts.
While an elevator operator and a self-driving car aren’t an apples-to-apples comparison, the example serves as a reminder that Americans have a history of adapting to new technology, even if it means losing jobs.
Restaurants may be the next industry to see this kind of change: Sweetgreen and White Castle are using robots to peel avocados and fry fries, and Chipotle is testing one that slices avocados and makes tortilla chips. Chipotle’s outgoing CEO, Brian Niccol, has said the robots will help the chain serve customers more consistent portions after they complained that their burrito bowls were too small.
Steve Ells, the founder and former CEO of Chipotle, opened a Manhattan restaurant called Colonel in February with just three employees. Ells told The Wall Street Journal that the robotic arm that flipped the burgers initially confused customers. In July, he closed the restaurant for 10 days to renovate it to make it more inviting and show that it was serving food.
It remains to be seen whether diners will prefer to be served by robots, but rising labor costs and sluggish restaurant sales in the coming years could lead more businesses to consider automation in hopes of improving profitability, Steven Zagor, a professor at Columbia Business School and food industry expert, told BI.
For now, where robots are being deployed, human workers work side by side with them, and in the short term, only large restaurant chains and well-funded startups are likely to have the resources to experiment extensively with automation, Zagor said.
“Robots are not perfect, they are hard to clean, they can break down, they are not easily customizable and they are expensive,” Zagor said.
In 2022, Chili’s paused its robot server program to allow it to focus more on other investments that will have a greater short-term impact on profitability. AI technology beyond robots isn’t always a cakewalk, either: In June, McDonald’s announced it would remove AI ordering technology from more than 100 drive-thrus after widespread reports of flaws in the technology.
Despite these setbacks, food workers remain vulnerable to job loss due to automation in the long term, Zagor said, noting that the threat of automation is one reason food workers have seen an uptick in unionization efforts in recent years.
This means that in the future, Americans may have to choose between largely automated fast-food chains and local restaurants run entirely by humans.
“For the most part, I think customers don’t really care how their burger or taco gets to them,” Zager said. “If all of a sudden the human touch is totally absent or minimal, I think they’re going to start feeling a little differently about your business.”
The Future of AVs for Riders, Drivers and City Dwellers
In the automotive industry, assembly lines have become increasingly automated and robots have become commonplace behind the scenes. They have taken over some of the more dangerous and repetitive tasks in factories, increasing productivity and speeding up production in most factories.
But unlike elevator operators being replaced by automation, or Waymo’s expansion into the streets of San Francisco, robots in car factories aren’t interacting with customers.
This kind of human-robot interaction is still in its very early stages, and progress can be subtle. The auto industry has been grappling with the question of what works when it comes to self-driving cars for the past seven years or so.
After several serious accidents, multiple automakers have halted or backed off self-driving plans and investors have retreated: in 2018, a self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, and last year, a Cruise self-driving car crashed in downtown San Francisco. In the past few years, Ford and Volkswagen have dissolved their self-driving car companies, and Apple has formally pulled the plug on its electric self-driving car project.
“In 2017, everyone thought that by 2023, self-driving cars would be everywhere, and right now they’re pretty much nowhere,” Niko Larko, director of the University of Oregon’s Center for Urbanism Next, told BI. “It’s hard. Things are definitely changing, but we need to figure out where self-driving cars work and where they don’t work.”
While ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft initially aimed to be leaders in developing self-driving technology, they are increasingly playing a partner role: Uber has cited Waymo as a partner for self-driving, and in July announced a partnership with China’s BYD to collaborate on self-driving.
In an email to Business Insider, an Uber spokesperson said self-driving cars will be the “industry’s partner of choice” and play a key role in the company’s business.
Lyft is also considering such partnerships, CEO David Risher said during an earnings call in August. Some drivers and labor unions have expressed concern that AVs could compete with and eventually replace drivers.
Nicole Moore, a part-time Lyft driver and president of the driver advocacy group Rideshare Drivers United, told Business Insider that without proper regulation, the introduction of AVs “could lead to a lot of job losses.”
“Today, on a daily basis, self-driving vehicles pose a threat to all workers in the transportation industry, including ride-hailing drivers, bus drivers and delivery workers,” she said.
Larco said that as well as impacting drivers and passengers, the rise of autonomous vehicles could lead to a decline in car ownership and allow space currently used for parking to be repurposed for housing.
Moreover, people may be willing to travel longer distances to work if they don’t have to pay attention to the roads while commuting, which could lead to more people moving outside of cities. This could lead to more people seeking more affordable housing, but the resulting urban sprawl could have negative environmental effects, he said.
The way we take a cab is also open to big changes. For now, riding in Waymo’s self-driving Jaguar I-Pace isn’t all that different from taking a regular cab. Some in the autonomous driving industry want to completely rethink what the inside of a car will be like, now that the driver is no longer the central driver of the ride.
Soon we will be able to hold meetings or even take a nap during our commute in a self-driving, chauffeur-driven car.
