In Which We Deserve Options Other Than Rapists and Robots

I don’t remember the first time I saw a Waymo on the streets of San Francisco, but I remember the first time it felt like an infestation. It was a balmy summer evening last year, and I was sitting in the parklet outside Elixir having a beer with a friend. After five or six of the ghostly driverless cars went by in under a minute, we started counting: 18, 19, 20. “What the fuck is going on?” my friend said. 

What the fuck was going on was that Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company founded by Google, had nearly tripled its fleet of cars in the Bay Area between March and August of 2024. I didn’t know the specifics at the time. But I’ve lived here long enough that I could smell the shift on the wind. Oh, I thought, it’s happening again. 

Indeed, we were at a familiar inflection point: Any justified concern that a reasonable person might have about these cars’ surveillance capabilities, their implications for labor, their tendency to impede emergency vehicles? Or their ability to kill beloved bodega cats? (More on that in a bit.) Oh, I realized, within a year, bringing any of that up is going to make me sound pedantic at a party. We didn’t get to vote on these cars, but now it’s time to either get on board or start to feel crazy for suggesting that they may not, in fact, be a great idea.

Like Imagine Dragons or garbage patches in the Pacific, Waymos are here, they’re shitty, get used to it.