Your robot has arrived

Waymo’s fully autonomous Jaguar I-PACE 

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Nathan Herrara was deciding how to get around San Francisco to take in some of the city’s essential experiences: a stop at the iconic Japantown and a visit to a museum tucked inside Golden Gate Park.

The Boston resident said he doesn’t use ridesharing services often at home, where he relies on his own car to get around the city. Recalling bad experiences with Uber drivers, he was eager to try out a very Silicon Valley-style mode of transportation with a ride in Alphabet’s autonomous taxi service, Waymo.

Herrara, who considers himself a tech enthusiast, was thoroughly impressed.

“I think the ride is great and I don’t feel unsafe or anything,” he said, adding that he absolutely trusts robot drivers more than humans. “They’re more cautious.”

By “they” he means the humanless, lidar-equipped vehicles for which Waymo has slogged through local and federal regulatory hoops for years. It’s now testing its autonomous driving vehicles in Austin while opening a waitlist for access in Los Angeles. The service was made available to limited parts of Phoenix in 2020.

After a yearslong waitlist, Waymo finally opened to the public in San Francisco, adding to the city’s mix of options that range from a sprawling public transportation network to traditional taxis and ride-hailing services led by Uber and Lyft.

Herrera said that, for him, choosing Waymo over other options was obvious. It’s cleaner, private, and, based on his experience, safe, he said. He recalled a time when his Uber driver got into a crash after tailing too close to the car in front of them.

“I always get worried,” he said of human rideshare drivers back home — or in Toronto, where he often visits for business trips, and the roads can get icy. “I always get worried how their record is driving in those kinds of conditions.”

Waymo’s robotaxi presents one of the 21st century’s more visible cases of automation directly posing as a service worker, rather than hiding away in a factory’s assembly line. Today, it’s giving you a ride to work; tomorrow, it could be making and serving your lunch. Some experts estimate that humanoid robots are up next in the coming decade — whether customers like it or not.

As Waymo’s tagline reads: “The future is now.”

Rise of the robots

Until the recent rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, robots directly performing services for humans were largely the stuff of science fiction — à la the Jetsons’ Rosie the Robot.

The first major instance was in elevator operation. Before roughly the 1950s, human elevator operators had control over the speed and direction of elevator cars. But in 1945, a strike by New York City operators set the stage for the wider adoption of automation.

Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist at the University of Oxford, sees similarities between this and the current rise of AV taxi rides. Elevator riders initially had similar safety concerns we hear about today with self-driving cars.

“People were very worried about not having a human directly responsible for their safety,” Frey said.

But over time, people became more comfortable as studies showed that automated rides were actually safer and made fewer mistakes than human-driven ones.

While elevator operators and AVs aren’t an apples-to-apples comparison, the example serves as a reminder that Americans have a history of growing comfortable with new technologies — even if they displace workers.

The next industry to see this type of transition could be restaurants. Sweetgreen and White Castle have utilized robots to peel avocados and fry potatoes, and Chipotle has tested robots that cut avocados and make tortilla chips. Brian Niccol, the outgoing CEO of Chipotle where some customers have complained about skimpy burrito bowls, has said robots could help provide customers with more consistent portion sizes.

In February, Chipotle founder and former CEO Steve Ells opened a restaurant in Manhattan called Kernel with only three employees. Ells told The Wall Street Journal that the robot arm that flipped burgers initially confused customers. In July, he closed the location for 10 days to make renovations intended to make the restaurant more welcoming and signal that it served food.

While it remains unclear if diners like being served by robots, in the years to come, high labor costs and slowing restaurant sales could push more businesses to explore automation in the hopes it will boost profitability, Stephen Zagor, Columbia Business School professor and food industry expert, told B-17.

For now, where robots have been introduced, human workers remain alongside them. In the short term, Zagor said it’s likely that only larger restaurant chains and well-funded startups will have the resources to experiment too much with automation.

“Robots aren’t perfect, they’re hard to clean, sometimes they break down, they’re not easy to customize, and they’re expensive,” Zagor said.

In 2022, Chili’s put its robot server program on pause so it could focus more on other investments that would have a bigger near-term impact on profitability. Non-robot AI technologies aren’t always a cakewalk either. In June, McDonald’s announced that it would be removing AI-ordering technology from over 100 drive-thrus after flaws with the technology went viral.

Despite setbacks like these, Zagor said the potential for automation to displace food industry workers in the long run remains. He pointed to the threat of automation as among the reasons more workers in the industry have made efforts to unionize in recent years.

This means that Americans may someday face the choice of a largely automated fast food chain or a fully human-run local restaurant.

“I think most of the time the customers are not really going to be concerned how that burger or taco gets to them,” Zagor said. “It’s when suddenly the human touch is totally gone or minimal, I think that’s where the customer might start to see a little bit of a change in their feeling about the business.”

The future of AVs for riders, drivers, and city dwellers

In the automotive industry, robots have become commonplace behind the scenes, with the rise of automation on the assembly line. Robots have taken over some of the more dangerous and repetitive jobs in a factory, increasing productivity and speeding up the production rate in most factories.

But unlike the replacement of elevator operators with automation and Waymo’s entry to the streets of San Francisco, automotive factory robots aren’t interacting with customers.

It’s still very early days for that type of human/robot interaction — and progress can be delicate. The automotive industry has spent the past seven or so years grappling with the question of what works when it comes to AVs.

Several automakers suspended or pulled back on their autonomous driving plans and investors fled after some serious accidents: A self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018 and a Cruise self-driving car was involved in an accident in downtown San Francisco last year. In the past few years, Ford and Volkswagen have disbanded their self-driving car company and Apple officially pulled the plug on its electric self-driving car project.

“In 2017, everyone thought AVs were going to be everywhere by 2023 … They’re barely anywhere right now,” Nico Larco, director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, told B-17. “This stuff – it’s hard. Things are definitely changing, but you got to figure out where they work and where they don’t work.”

While ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft initially aimed to be leaders in driverless technology development, these ride providers have moved into more of a partnership role. Uber lists Waymo as one of its partners in autonomous driving and announced in July a partnership with China’s BYD to collaborate on autonomous driving.

In an email, a spokesperson for Uber told B-17 that autonomous vehicles will play a crucial role in the company’s business by becoming “the partner of choice for the industry.”

According to statements made by CEO David Risher on an earnings call in August, Lyft also envisions such partnerships. Some drivers and labor organizations have raised concerns about the potential for AVs to compete with and eventually replace drivers.

Nicole Moore, a part-time Lyft driver and president of the driver-advocacy group Rideshare Drivers United, told B-17 that without proper regulation, the rollout of AVs could “kill a lot of jobs.”

“Right now, on a day-to-day basis, AVs are a threat to all workers in the transport industry,” she said, including ride-hailing drivers, bus drivers, and delivery workers.

In addition to affecting drivers and riders, more driverless cars could also lead to lower levels of car ownership, freeing up spaces currently used for parking to be repurposed for housing, Larco said.

Additionally, if people don’t have to pay attention to the road during their commutes, they might be willing to travel longer distances to work — which could lead more people to move outside cities. While this could allow more people to pursue more affordable housing, he said the urban sprawl that might result could have negative environmental impacts.

There’s also a lot of room for the taxi rides themselves to change. Right now, riding in one of Waymo’s driverless Jaguar I-Paces isn’t all that different from your typical taxi ride. Some in the AV industry would like to completely rethink the inside of a car now that a driver won’t be at the center of its operation.

Chauffeured by your autonomous driver, you could soon be taking meetings — or a nap — during your commute.