Business | Schumpeter

Cherish your Uber drivers. Soon they will be robots

The robotaxi revolution is upon us

An imaginary cartoon self-driving car with a person working on a laptop driving over a traffic jam
Image: Brett Ryder

This column was not written by ChatGPT. But it did have the benefit of another breathtaking technology that could change life as we know it. It was partly typed in the back of a Waymo self-driving taxi that, with ghostly serenity, climbed the hills of San Francisco, through the fog of Twin Peaks (it was still “Fogust”), around the spaced-out hippies of Haight-Ashbury to the Golden Gate Bridge. Rather than driving into wet concrete, as one of its hapless rivals did recently, it politely gave way to a cement mixer that swerved across its path. It was a scenic—and entirely trustworthy—office-on-wheels.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “No one behind the wheel ”

From the September 2nd 2023 edition

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