I f*cking love Waymo: your questions answered
I am an unrepentant techno-optimist. Good things are good, and we can build them.
There are serious challenges to this view, but the objections I hear more often are unserious. For example: “What happened to self-driving cars? There was such a hype cycle around them, and then it turned out to be fake!”
But they are not fake, they are very real. Right now, I can take a Waymo.
What is Waymo?
Waymo is a service that operates in San Francisco that lets you order self-driving car to take you where you want to go. It’s like Uber or Lyft, but the car that shows up has an empty driver seat, and operates as if by magic. The car drive itself, with you in it, calmly to your destination.
My son calls them “spinny cars”, because if the conspicuous LIDAR sensors that sit on top. I told him that when I was his age, only people could drive cars, an he gave me a skeptical look.
Why do you love them?
If you have to ask, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a friendly car that drives itself to where you need to go. That is intrinsically awesome.
What about Uber?
We still have Uber or Lyft, which I take to the airport, because Waymo won’t go there yet, or when the wait is too long.
But otherwise I take Waymo. You are in the car by yourself. It’s never distracted, chatty, or tired. And you don’t need to tip.
It’s Way better.
What about Tesla?
I love Tesla. I have a model Y.
There is an argument that soon Tesla will overtake Waymo, because while Waymo was messing around with LIDAR Tesla is figuring out how to make self-driving work with normal vision. Tesla has a software problem, but Waymo has a hardware problem, and software problems are easier to solve.
I find that plausible, but still-theoretical. I try the supervised self-driving abilities in my Tesla every time they ship an update. It’s amazing, in absolute terms, but in comparison to riding in a Waymo, it sucks.
So I’m optimistic about the future, but for now Tesla self-driving has a “still can’t actually drive itself” problem, and Waymo already works.
Who cares?
I am a techno-optimist. I grew up in an age of massive advancement in computers, smartphones, and the internet. But besides those things, the physical world I lived in felt stagnant.
Moving to San Francisco, and seeing those “spinny cars” drive themselves around gave me a visceral sense that the future might come after all.
We can make friendly machine-beasts that roam around the city and take us where we need to go. In the struggle of man vs nature, man vs nothingness, man vs chaos and darkness and despair, man is still winning.
Our children can grow up in a new and better world than the one we inherited.
Hell yeah. Thank you, Waymo.
If you hadn't quit vaping, you'd have known we're living in a golden era of hardware development: everything getting cheaper, faster, smarter, and more powerful at such insane rates that it's hard to reason about e.g. industrial design anymore because what's possible changes so fast!
Obviously I agree at the macro though: in shared spaces —I suspect because of our general political dysfunction— there's been wild technology lag. I think architecture is a good example: I don't know anything and could be wrong, but it seems strange to see the materials and fabrication advances we see everywhere but see very little changing, and glacially, in architecture. As you know, I go to church, and I often wonder: is any architect, anywhere in the world, trying to make the most visually and acoustically and psychologically awe-inspiring experience with today's technologies and methods, as they once did with churches? Or for any other purpose? What would that look like? Should all walls and floors be OLEDs? How tall could the tallest building be now? What can we do with light, sound, color, interaction, etc.?
I am deeply excited for self-driving cars, too. I think we might have discussed this, but: self-driving RVs —esp. once they can really be designed entirely as living spaces, no driving space needed— will revolutionize the busted dynamics of urban real estate. Instead of buying a home, many will buy a home that moves; they can follow opportunities, get dropped off in urban cores and picked up there too without parking, can "live" outside the city, can vacation while doing their normal routine, etc..
There are hundreds of angles like that: little stuck states self-driving will increment forward, problems that will suddenly vanish, opportunities that will open up, etc. A mature self-driving vehicle industry will change so much about America and the world for the better that I really do hope to see it.
I cannot wait for the day that they operate to SFO