In a Driverless World, Who Loses and Who Wins?

Hey there, it's Steven Dubner. Last week, you heard part one,

“a two-part series on the rise of the driverless cars.”

It was made by our friends at the search engine podcast, which is hosted by PJ Vote.

If you've never listened to search engine before,

I would suggest you also check out their episodes on peptides and emphropic. You can find them on any podcast app. And now here's part two of the search engine series on driverless cars, as always, thanks for listening.

[MUSIC] Our first story was about a driver, a robot driver, who evolved over many years at the nudging and training and machinations of a team of tech people in California. The second story I want to tell you also

starts with the driver. A driver who is also going to evolve and change

“due to the machinations of some different West Coast tech companies.”

The difference is that this driver is a human being.

Chapter one, Abdiazis. [MUSIC] I met Abdiazis in Boston, where he's been a driver for many decades. He's doing it all the way back in the '90s.

Back then, he considered taxi driver to be at these in job. A career. Professionally, I've been driving for 30 years now. 30 years. Yes, I had a limo service for 10 years.

And then I was doing a five years follow-up cab, a taxi. And then, one day in 2011, Abdiazis was hanging out at the airport with the other drivers. When he's a man from the future showed up with a plan to change his life.

“When Uber came, I remember by 2011, they came to the airport.”

We were in the waiting area at the Logan. We have a designated parking lot where we weight the fares. So they come there and they say, hey, we are introducing you an a company that will do same as a taxi, but it's an app.

We want you guys to join with us. And you can have your own car. We will give you a phone with the app. And we can sign you up and you can make money. What did you think?

At the time, I say, it is good, but you didn't come here to help us. You come here to kill this business. You knew, I knew. Abdiazis had not been important yesterday.

Here's what he understood immediately.

The taxi business he operated in, up until now, had worked as a kind of monopoly. In Boston, like many American cities, you legally were not allowed to drive a cab without a taxi license, a medallion, new medallions were almost never issued. So assuming you could afford to buy or rent a medallion, the city itself would make your job stable by protecting you from competition.

But Uber was about to kill that system. Uber drivers just drove without medallions. The company argued that since they were picking up passengers via this newfangled phone app, they didn't need them. Abdiazis knew that this was going to kill the industry, at least as it currently existed.

Taxi driver would still be a job, but medallion owning taxi driver would not be a wave was coming. He knew what he had to do, and so he told his fellow taxi drivers his strategy for dealing with Uber, the company that had come to kill their industry. I told them, "Listen, I'm going to join with them."

I said, "I see where they go and I read a lot of articles about them. They start from San Francisco, they want to Chicago, I say, they are expanding. So we can't stop this week, we cannot stop Uber." So Abdiazis found himself working for Uber. He says someone at the company handed him his new marching orders.

We can give you a laptop, we can give you 200 phones each week. So we want you to give this phones to the drivers that you hire, but we want you to set it up, they need to bring their driver license, they need to bring their social security. And then you sign them up, everyone that you sign you, give it a phone, you activate the phone, they go to go.

So they were giving you 200 iPhones a week to give out, to give out, yeah, to the driver. So it's crazy. It's like they're kind of, they're coming to kill you. You're busy there. Exactly.

I knew.

I knew.

“That's why I said, "If you cannot beat them, join them, you know."”

So I'm going to join them. Abdiazis, a man who could glimpse the future clearly enough to adapt to it.

He'd work recruiting for Uber for a while, then he'd be one of the first 100 Uber drivers

in Boston, signed up for Uber Black, the premium service, got himself a very expensive car. At first, it was an even better job than the one they'd destroyed. Uber in those early days was pretty generous. But after a few years, Abdiazis says that started to change.

In 2022, Uber began rolling out a big change to its platform. Instead of taking a set percentage of each fair, Uber started using an algorithm, to offered drivers variable rates, based on what its system thought each driver would accept for a given ride. The drivers believe that Uber, once it's up, showing them its take, raised that take by

a lot. Uber, who we contacted for the story, maintains that their take rate is still, quote, "around 20%, and that what's gone up actually are government taxes and fees."

“But Abdiazis does not believe them, and most drivers I've talked to share his view.”

Abdiazis's perspective is that once Uber and Lyft had leverage, they started using it against the drivers. The market was wide open, new drivers signed up every day. If you didn't like it, you could leave. To Abdiazis and his fellow drivers, this all felt like a bait and switch.

They could quit, but many of them had car loans. What they actually wanted was for the companies to raise their pay closer to what it had been before. They wanted better pay. They wanted some other concessions.

Some of the drivers started thinking about whether there might be some way to exercise power of the apps. They started talking about a union. And so Abdiazis found himself, once again, a recruiter for a disruptive new organization. So when we started, we were like 400 drivers and we joined the union.

You were early at Uber, you were early at the U.S. Exactly. Exactly. Because I've been in the industry for quite a while. 30 years, I know what is coming on.

It is my profession, and the union, they say, "Okay, call all the drivers, let us unite, and then we're going to go to the state." Did it feel a little bit like when Uber was having you sign people up, and then the union having you sign people? Does it feel similar?

Does it feel similar? Like going around, explaining something to people, telling them what the benefits are. Absolutely. Exactly. Because you see a lot of drivers, they don't know nothing about union.

Things were really compromising. They got a big ballad initiative in front of Massachusetts voters that gave them the right to even try to unionize. They were collecting signatures. But then during this still fledgling moment in their union drive, a different tech company

appeared on the horizon.

“Do you remember the first time you heard about Waymo?”

The Waymo, the first time I heard, was back in 2022.

I heard in San Francisco that they are doing testing, what did you think? I say, "Okay, I'm not against technology. I welcome any technology, the same as Uber, what they come to business." But I knew where they heading to. He'll see when Uber came, their M was to kill taxi business.

Now Waymo is to kill the drivers. How you understand a story, what you feel as you hear it, it's so much about where the tailored truth is to start it. The driverless car in the story I'd heard had begun as a contest among academics, who were not primarily driven by profit.

Some of them had genuinely wanted to solve the problem of car accidents. Others thought that making a robot drive across a desert, which is a very cool puzzle to put their minds to. Those experiments had been sharpened into a technological product, inside the cushy bubble of an enormously wealthy tech company.

Who now had sent mapping cars to obdisee the city, the first step to deployment there.

When Uber had come to town, obdisees had thought if he can't beat him, join him. Now Waymo is here, and he saw no way to join them, so he had to find a way to beat them. Fortunately for obdisees, he's in Boston. "My name is Sharon Durkin, District Dates City Counselor, and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Planning Development Transportation."

Chapter two. "Union Town," Boston City Counselor has begun meeting last summer to discuss preemptively banning Waymo from their city. The first meeting took place in July, inside Boston City Hall, a room resplendent in many hues of municipal ground.

The state of the agenda for the hearing, DACA1141, sounded neutral to the point of boring. Order for a hearing to evaluate autonomous vehicle operations in the city of Boston.

understand the regulatory landscape. We must explore this very dry description.

“What was it actually going to happen would be significantly more raucous?”

These hearings started out with the flavor and intensity of a political rally. People wanted to find a way to stop these cars, and this would be the room where they laid out the case as to why. It'd be the beginning of the fight. Some version of this fight has been happening with increasing frequency in American cities,

not all cities, blue cities. There's this pattern actually observed by reporter Timothy Bealey, which is that cities in red and purple states like Austin and Phoenix mostly welcome Waymo, whereas places like DC and New York fight it. In cities that fight Waymo, the conversation is less about safety, and much more about

weather, robo taxis will take away jobs. My hope was if I paid attention to Boston. Maybe what was beginning here as just a fight would evolve. Into politicians starting to think through some kind of compromise. I think these kinds of compromises, finding solutions for workers who AI could displace,

they are probably one of the most important challenges for our politicians today.

And so Boston, for me, was a test case. Are we capable? Where are our politics ready? So here's how things began. Bostonians were here today to talk about something contentious, jobs, but they started

with the one thing everybody could probably agree on. Boston's streets, the battleground here, were barely fit for human driving, let alone Waymo. Boston is one of the oldest major cities in the country with narrow, one-way street, Sally's, in the lack of a traditional grid system.

It's really, really difficult to drive. You will get the map. It looks like a child's drawing, you know. We also have issues with double podcasts, right, she has delivery vehicles. After the lambasting Boston streets a while longer, the people here get to the issue that

will actually dominate these hearings. Jobs, in particular, union jobs. We need to address potential layoffs for our union drivers with the introduction of self-driving cars.

“I think it's important that, you know, we listen when we hear teamsters in the Carmen Union,”

S-E-I-U, and countless residents who fail lying sighted by this. The app drivers union, Hobby is easy as union, where the stars of the hearing today. I'm a problem number of AVU, app drivers union, and I'm here to ask you to protect your local jobs. My chair drivers just won the right to unionize and to fight for better wages and conditions. Robot cars threaten all of this progress.

I'll do these with job too, at a later hearing. I understand if it's a business, if it's a cabitallism, but not in my city, at the expense of our jobs. Thank you. The app drivers were not officially a union yet, technically they were still in the process

of forming, but the threat from Waymo seems so dire that this larger coalition had been created that included a bunch of historic unions. It was called Labor United Against Waymo. Every driver's union in Boston, uniting to try to kill Waymo here. At the tip of the spear, the teamsters.

Nationally, teamsers are the largest union of drivers in America, 1.4 million members, Boston's one of their biggest strongholds. This is the union that started out as workers driving teams of horses, but evolved to represent workers who drive cars and trucks, and these say it represents lots and lots of blue collar union jobs.

Boston's a union town. Everybody said this to me, over and over. In the same quick matter of fact way that people where I'm from say New York's expensive,

“do I use toss off a truth so obvious it's barely worth repeating, but would you have to”

repeat all the time, because it informs everything always.

The teamsters and the politicians just kept repeating it, Boston's a union town. Boston is a union town, and you hear a CD perfectly where we are. Our city, we're proud of our workers, we proud of Boston is a union town, we're not any of those other cities, so. Yeah, we're a union city here in the city of Boston, we want to protect.

And watching the hearings, I could see part of what was so beautiful about Boston being a union town. As driver after driver testified about their jobs, there's just something moving. To me anyway, about watching people talk about the dignity and importance of human work. A few days ago, while on my route I spotted a man claps on the ground, he was unconscious

and unresponsive, and it became clear that he had overdosed. I stayed with him flagged on a homeowner who called 911.

When the first responder arrived, they administered knock-hand, and I had not seen him and acted

quickly, he may have died. To me, a person to way move an obstacle to avoid. Good union members who drove UPS trucks, ambulances, and while these teamsers were not immediately under threat from UAMO's Robotaxi service, they knew that driverless technology was not

We see the writing on the wall.

We know that driverless car and truck companies are salivating at the idea that they could eliminate teamster jobs. Nationally, the teamsters actually sat out the last presidential race, but in Boston, the teamsters are still welded to the Democrats, and the Democrats are welded to them.

“If you want to go, I was knocking doors with drivers across the city to organize.”

You guys just were able to unionize, and this would just be a huge blow to you all. As the city counselors began to ask union leaders questions, you got the sense that counselors already knew some of these answers. That maybe they were asking more just to get the answers on the public record. And I'm just curious, can you talk to us a little bit about the number of conversations

that you've had with WAMO how many times did you meet with them? This is City Counselor Julia Mejia asking one of the teamsters leaders, how many times did WAMO reach out to you before they sent mapping cars to Boston? Thank you for the question, Councilor Mejia, it rhymes with hero. Zero.

Zero. This is why I asked the question, because oftentimes things are being done to us without us, right?

“Chapter three, Councilor Mejia, the counselor had arrived in our late to the hearing.”

A former MTV reporter, she's no disability hyper, but in the median municipal politician, standing out in the beige sea of the city council room. She'd come to listen to the heroes, the drivers, but more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains.

Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way more than that, and she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains.

Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Walls looks the part of the tech exact.

A spiffy suit, a swoopy cloth of silver hair. For most of their conversation, they're talking past each other, because Matt Walls wants to discuss safety. And Councillor Mikia wants to discuss driver's jobs. What we are doing is creating an opportunity for people to choose to not support humans

and the workforce. That is the choice that we're giving people. I would disagree, Councillor. I would say the choice we're giving people is they can make a decision if they want to be in a safer vehicle that they feel safer and that meets their goals. And so what we say is that our Uber and Lyft drivers are not safe.

I am not making comments specifically about the safety of Uber and Lyft. What I can say is that over after 71 million miles of fully autonomous operations on U.S. roads, we know that we are five times less injury calls and crashes than human drivers. I am not suggesting that Uber and Lyft drivers are dangerous. I am suggesting that human drivers compared to the way Mo driver are involved in some more is that a driver.

Way Mo is the robot. So let's, let's, let's, let's, without it, you're totally critical.

That's being really clear about what it is. It's an apparatus. We refer, when we say way Mo driver, I know the chair brought us up earlier. We, that is the what we call the way Mo. That is what we call the technology. And I understand it has sensitivities and we want to-- I mean, triggering. Understood. And we're allowed to make sure that we're not driving there.

That's not happening. So right now, in supermarkets, they do these stuff.

“So Boston is, if like, a little character, you know? I think that it could have been, you know,”

CEOs versus bees. Boston would just be like, we're on the bee side. You know, like, we're going to go hard for honey. You know, like, we're crazy like that. I got to talk to Councillor Mehea, the politician who'd been so offended by way Mo's use of the D word. We met in person in our office in Dorchester. The Councillor was giving me and producer Emily Maltaire, a quick lesson on Boston. This foreign country where I'd happily landed.

We are just not the type of city that just goes along to get along with certain things that we feel especially like Boston is a union town. We're hard core. We don't-- we're adverse to outsiders. It's a city, but it's like a little old town, you know? It's like very towny here. Well, this gets to what I want to ask you about, which is Waymo. Like when do you recall the

first time Waymo even as a concept? Should I button your radar?

Yeah, right before the hearing. Like I didn't know, like, first of all, I'm not one of those people. I don't pay attention to everything. I'm like, you know, like, I have my own little bubble here, you know, I'm dealing with education issues, pot holes, like murder, you know, like real life issues. That impact the quality of life of my constituents. And so it wasn't until recently when there was some rumblings of Waymo wanting to set up shop here in Boston that I hadn't learned that

I like all excited about them. Like, wow, people like this. So I was searching about because

“you're curious. And then the algorithm starts being like, just videos of like happy people”

in driverless cars. I'm like, oh, wow, like, who are these people really excited? Getting driven around by a robot or just not even a robot. There are some of these only have a little head. They're just like, yeah, it's just a steering wheel. Yeah, that's even creepier. So that was like, ew, yeah, no. I've talked to a few people who feel this way when they see videos of Waymo's. Part of this is a quirk of design. There are other models of driverless cars that were fully

designed to be driverless, like Amazon zooms. Those cars don't have a steering wheel. But Waymo retrofits pre-existing Jaguar SUVs. And so when you get in one, they're still a steering wheel.

As a passenger, you watch it turn itself as if guided by an invisible pair of hands.

Watching that wheel turn. Some people feel wonder, like they're seeing the work of a very

“impressive engineer. Others feel outraged. Like they're watching the space where a human used to be.”

Should still be. That's Julia's perspective. When Julia was five, she and her mom moved to Boston from the Dominican Republic. Her mother was undocumented for most of her childhood. She cleaned offices for a living. Julia talks better mom a lot. How from her mom, she inherited an understanding of her mission to protect working people's jobs. I used to work at McDonald's. I used to clean offices with my mom. I did all of that.

Those were low entry jobs that I could get. And I saw that with the self-checkout in the supermarket. Those jobs were occupied oftentimes by people who were retired. Or high school students or young people with disabilities, right? And now those jobs are being replaced by a self-checkout. And there's a sense of, for me, it's a moral issue too, right? That should be at the center of the AI conversation. Is that morally, while it's exciting? And we could do all of this,

“and we could save lots of money. But what is the unintended consequence of that, right?”

When you look at it now, like you said, people too. Really? Get out of the line. What you're doing there? You don't have somebody's job that you just took. They're like, lady, get out my face. I'm like, yes, but not, man. It's, you know, I'm at the moral police, but I just feel like we are not thinking about other people. We're often just thinking about ourselves and what is the quickest way to get out. To counter me here, the headline of the day,

really the only story was low wage workers. In the hearing, she asked the way Moex Executive about the precedent that was wearing her. Those self-checkout machines. So right now, in supermarkets, they do these self-checkouts. Correct. Right? And those are taking jobs from people. And it seems like there is a trend here. And my biggest concern as someone who had to have two to three jobs growing up just to make ends meet is that what we are doing is creating financial hardships for

people who are already struggling. And so I'm just curious how are you reconciling with that impact that you're making on already low wage workers? I, as I said earlier to the other council's question, we are committed to increasing workforce developments and job opportunities with the industry. Yeah. But for the drivers, how are you increasing workforce development opportunities for the drivers? Not for people who develop apps, not for people who have their phones,

for people who are drivers like, tell me about what that looks like. We do not have workforce efforts that are specifically aimed at any part of the population. We have, we are creating jobs for individuals that want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry. If drivers are that cruel, how you understand a story in part has to do with who you hear it from. For months, I've been listening to the engineers who first dreamed up the Australia's cars.

From their perspective, they'd only ever really had one question. Could they build a car that

drove itself more safely than humans could? Waymo believed the answer is now yes. But Boston had

a different question. What about jobs? I did speak to Waymo's northeast policy manager, Anthony Perez, who said he didn't want to be disingenuous. He expected over time there would be what he called transition for app drivers. But that it wasn't a one to one displacement. He said Waymo would also create jobs, cleaning the cars, maintaining the sensors, repairing the vehicles. The estimate he pointed me to said every five row of taxis might create one job. But he was also

careful to say that it was just very hard to predict the future. Different cities would be different. He wasn't trying to be evasive, he explained. He was trying to be honest about real uncertainty. But in the hearing that day, as Councillor Mejia pressed Waymo's Matt Walls to describe,

Matt Walls came up short. If drivers that currently work for Uber or Lyft should decide that they

“want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry, there will be opportunities for them to do so.”

What would their jobs title be? I'm not going to sit here and sort of speculate what the job opportunity is. Let's just come to terms with the fact that we are creating a hostile environment for our hardworking people who are no longer going to have work. I appreciate the question. I forget the guy's name, but he just felt a little bit arrogant and I felt like, even after everybody spoke, there should have been a little bit more humility and humanity in his understanding

of why people were so adverse to the idea of losing their jobs. He could have won me over a little bit if he gave me a little bit more heart and he didn't. You really think he could have won you over? No. I'm just joking. No. Nobody could win me over.

“Part of the issue? Matt Walls was an outsider. Worse an outsider from a tech company worth”

126 billion dollars. The logic of Boston politics said that nobody in this room had to listen to him.

He was here in his role as a well compensated pinata. I understood that. At the same time, if Weimo was right, if its driver was 80% safer than a human one, that meant there would be preventable car accidents in Boston in the years to come. Extents caused by human drivers making human mistakes. We lose our tempers. We check our phones. We think about other things while driving. We don't mean to, but we do. And sometimes that means we heard other people.

The people we heard would not be voting in the Democratic primary a week after this hearing, but I thought they deserved to have more of a place in the conversation than they'd had so far. Emily Maltaire, my colleague who'd been observing the interview in Councillor Mejia's office, at one point she chimed at. I feel like for me in learning about this technology, I was very skeptical about the safety of it. And I mean, I've known people who have

died in car crashes. I know someone who died in the back seat of an Uber. I don't think it was the Uber driver's fault, but I feel like as I learned more about the technology, I did take seriously the idea that there could be something safer about Waymo technology. Is that something

“that you're curious about? Not curious about that in any kind of way, because when I think about”

safety, and let's just give you the example of the car accident, I don't see someone instinctually coming out of the car to get someone out. Like if it was a Waymo robot or not, there's not even a robot, it's just a wheel. Who would be there to help support the consumer? Who? What? How? So, I don't think the safety concern is a good compelling argument for me. For you, it's like, I don't think there's anything they would show you where you would think.

You just trust humans more. I would hope the world would trust humans more.

Counselor Mehia told us, when she left that first hearing, she was pretty sure her side had won.

The unions, the app drivers, had made their case against the robots. The Waymo executives had clearly been outmatched. The thing was, though, counselor Mehia had missed something. There'd been one person who's testimony, she just hadn't heard. Someone who'd speak for two brief minutes, and who'd begin to change the entire conversation in Boston. After short break, Carl.

I'm Steven Dubner, from Freak and I'm excited when you were listening to a special episode of the podcast, "Search Engine." Hey there, it's Steven Dubner, and we are back with our friends from "Search Engine." Here is host PJ Vote. Welcome back to the show. Emily and I had been in Boston a couple days now. The cold snap here was at a level

I found frankly offensive. I dressed wrong for it, and was getting those full body jitter bug shivers vibrating down the sidewalk when we go outside. Very cold. It's the cold you feel in your teeth.

I'm wearing short underwear. Exactly as much as I was suffering. Emily Maltaire was thriving. Emily, a devoted public transportation nerd, she actually worked for a time in Boston's transit agency. Emily was just happy to be here. A mental tropical vacation. She kept cheerfully suggesting we ride the tea to get to her interviews and harassing me with Boston Transit Facts. Did you know the Boston Boston is only a dollar

70? That's amazing. Yeah, I was working for the tea when they did fair raises and one of my

personal transit heroes, Laurel Page at Seekin's, fought really hard to keep the bus fairs low. What were they at before the raises? Well, the, um, I would cower in the warm alcoves of whatever local business would let me, then hustle into Uber's whenever possible, insisting that taking cabs here was not a luxury or weakness. It was in fact important research.

“That's what the story was about. It was a joke, but it wasn't. I did want to talk to as many”

drivers as I could while I was in Boston. I'd end up interviewing eight for the Union's office and a random sample of four out in the world. Nearly all the drivers described the job as having recently gotten a harder, just like Abdiazee's had. They were working more hours for less money. But the Union and non-union workers differed in some important ways. The non-union drivers didn't really have way more on their radar, and they were only to think of driving as a long-term career.

This matches the data we have. A 2018 study found that the average Uber driver drives for three months. It's a lot of people's first job in our country, a ladder to their next one. So the Union drivers were pretty unusual, just by dentro the fact that they made a career out of this. Those were the things I learned in the cabs I could persuade Emily to take, and in the studies, I read about those cabs. This Tuesday, however, we were walking. The Boston win playfully

tearing the skin for my bones. Our mission that morning was to meet a man named Carl Richardson,

for an interview that was thankfully indoors. He met us in the lobby. We'd never met in person before,

but everything I saw was in what I saw him. Carl has significant hearing loss. He wears two hearing aids. He's also almost completely blind. He has a yellow labyrinth with him at all times. That's his guide dog, Dean. Carl had shown up in these hearings as a private citizen to argue in favor of autonomous vehicles. Like Councillor Julie Mejia, he'd been outraged by what he encountered, but for entirely different reasons.

Capture three. The right to autonomy. Carl told me the story of the day as he'd experienced it. First of all, when I walked a cloth to the hall plaza, you can hear protest and malleys. Union protest and malleys. Then I walked him, and I got there about an hour early on purpose, so I could sign on the pizza paper, and I had my intern with me. She said I was number three on my left.

“So I was hoping to go early. We got there. I think they were probably”

lifted. The food of restaurant union was there. The app drivers union was there. The FDIU union was there. The teamster union was there. Remember the ambulance driver union being there. So the disability community was far outnumbered. And I will even tell you that I am full of disabled people left. They were so discarded. Based on what they were here, I may even even want to testify. Why? What do they find specifically discouraging?

I think that they felt like the facility comfort had already made up their mind. And I think they heard anger in the room. So some of the people didn't stay. I felt outnumbered. But I still felt like I had an important door to tell. Carl in the room that day, kept waiting to speak. He had expected that because of his early sign-up,

he'd be one of the first speakers. Instead, he waited nearly the entire four hours.

For some reason, they'd slotted him almost at the very end. Carl Richardson, you have two minutes, nice to see you. Hi, my name is Carl Richardson. I am the manager to stay out the ADA coordinator, and I'll throw an advisory board member for me. You see Carl. He's wearing a light blue button up in a tie. We've heard a lot about the impact on the union and the drivers and the workforce.

“Let's talk about the community. I think it would impact and favor out. Not only people with”

physical disabilities like myself, but people with mental health. And by the time I testified, I threw out my written prepared remarks. And I just wouldn't be able to. We keep talking about employment. I want to have that discussion. Do you know how many jobs I've turned down because I can't

in the disability community. It's high. Their unemployment rate is twice as high as the rest of the workforce. One contributing factor to that number that a lot of people don't think about, it's just transportation. You can't do a job if you can't reliably get to it.

I agree to Uber drive and parent-trained to do an amazing job, but not always. At least once a week,

I get denied access to Uber and Lyft because they refused to take me because I have a service dog. And then, and then I mean, my civil rights. I often get denied access to because they won't go beyond the study limit because they're worried about maximizing their revenue in the ability

“to pick up a return fair. My life is not limited to the silly limit. And the other thing”

would do, it would increase. There's actually been pretty well documented issues with discrimination by Uber drivers against disabled people. There's an active DOJ lawsuit about right now. Wheelchair users, whose rides are canceled because we take extra time to help them load in. Blind people whose rides are canceled once the drivers see a service dog. A spokesperson in Uber said they have a zero tolerance policy for confirmed service

denials, and that Uber fundamentally disagrees with the DOJ's allegations. In the meantime, Carl says he spends a lot of time trying to strategize ways to stop Uber drivers from passing him by. Harrow was born with a genetic condition called usher syndrome, type 2. It meant he was destined to lose his vision in hearing, but gradually and as an adult. It's a difficult diagnosis, in part because psychologically it requires you to accept so much.

To accept loss, knowing that moral loss is just a head. That whatever you get used to, you'll need to get used to more. There's a time in Carl's adult life, for instance, when you had a driver's license. So I drove. I had 2020 vision up until I was about 30. Which is one of the reasons why autonomous vehicles are a big deal to me because I want that feeling that I used to have when I drove. Of freedom and independence and mobility.

I know what I bought, you know, so I want that back. So it's not that people deal with it differently.

And I have a sister who doesn't have that. She never took up driving because she knew.

She was going to have to give that up someday. I just need him when I have a heartbroken. I, that's good. I'm going to drive. I'm going to work in film and television.

“I'm going to do everything I can. What have a card did you drive?”

Well, whatever I hadn't totaled. I drove what 10, 12 years. I think I totaled five cards. Because I remember I was slowly going blind, but I was in denial. So I'm lucky to be alive and sitting here with you today. It was hard to like of driving. Yeah, but what finally happened is, I stepped behind the wheel of a car one day. It's getting ready to go to work. And I actually said to myself,

am I going to get to work alive today? And I sat there and I couldn't answer it.

So I called out thick and I never drove again.

It's a hard thing to give up. Yeah. And I want it back. And I never thought I'd get it back. But I now believe someday within my lifetime. We might have to convince the politicians. You don't need to have eyesight to be able to have the ability to drive an autonomous vehicle. But I think we can do it because it isn't just about blind people. Everybody has a mother that they have to take away their drive and phone.

“Everybody have the father where they say, "Dad, I don't know if you should drive anymore."”

Everybody have the teenager who's texting on their phone. They were not even human to think about the possibilities of what autonomous vehicles could do. The other reason I don't want to ban autonomous vehicles in the city of Boston is because I think eventually, it'll lead to personal ownership. And is that what you really want? Or are you bet? I'm not kidding when I say I have a, a statement that's not why I put aside a few

hundred bucks a month, just put the ability for me to buy an autonomous vehicle someday. And if they ban autonomous vehicles, then they're going to ban me from the right to drive on 11th, go to school, go to medical appointment, go to the beach on a Sunday, go visit my mom on the nurse and home, whatever, with the flexibility that everybody else has. Harrell wanted me to know that even though Waymo had become the subject of this fight,

he did not care if Waymo specifically came to Boston. Any autonomous car company would do. He just wanted to be able to hail a taxi that couldn't pass him by. Anyone in one day to own a car again. In the hearing, near the end of his a lot of time,

Imagine at your blind and your mother called you at seven o'clock on the Sunday night and said, I just heard from the sheriff department, I'm going to get arrested unless they come up with some money right away. She got a call, she believed it. I'm the primary care given my family. I had to figure out a way to get out there. I got denied three times in a row while I was trying to get out to my mother. Public transportation was not true because it was late on the Sunday

night. All I wanted the ability was to be able to go home to my mom and say, you're okay, and I love you. And that would be the positive impact of autonomous vehicles. So yeah, definitely think about the human component and the people component, but think about it for the whole community at large, not just the union. Thank you. Thank you so much, Carla. How do you think the politicians in the room saw you? Well, I don't think they were there to hear my speech. The only one that was

“there to hear was the chair there here. I'm your testimony. So I'm here alone now. So I think it's time”

to adjourn the hearing. All the other city counselors had left before Carl's testimony. Many of them had announced in the hearing that they had to go attend a different team source event, a strike by the sanitation workers, Boston's a union town. Docket 1, 1, 4, 1 is adjourned. At that hearing, I didn't feel like the disability voice or perspective would turn, and it was them that I decided I was going to go back and bring even more people with me

to the second hit on. The second hearing. In July, two city counselors had unveiled a fairly

bold anti-way mode ordinance. The ordinance to create that any driverless car in Boston had to have a human driver in the driver seat at all times, and called for a feasibility study of the tech, which would include organized labor, but not the disability community. If passed, functionally,

“this would be a ban. The plan was to vote on the ordinance after the second hearing,”

which would take place in October. The driverless car in Boston was on trial. This after a short break. I'm Stephen Dubner from Freakonomic Radio. You were listening to part two of the series on driverless cars from our friends at the podcast search engine. We'll be right back. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and here again is the host of the search engine podcast PJ vote. Welcome back to the show, and to a crisp late October day in Boston.

For the record, my name is Gabriella Claude is a Patha district one city counselor on the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Government Operations today is October 28th, 2020.

Chapter four. A good fight. The second hearing would go differently.

It would go differently from the beginning. One reason was because of its referee,

“presiding counselor Gabriella Claude as a Patha, who started by trying to establish some ground.”

So there will be no demonstration of approval, or disapproval, or signs. So thank you so much for your understanding. We appreciate you again. Thank you so much for being here. The union went first, a string of testimonies from all sorts of drivers, many familiar faces from the previous hearing. And of course, counselor Julia Michoeva is here, dressed today in a janty black beret in black glasses. I'm still in shock that I have to even have this conversation

that here we are in the day and eight trying to defend ourselves from robots taking over our jobs, right? And right here, this is the first line of defense because firstly come for the poor jobs,

right? First of all, I'm always ready for a good fight. So I walked in ready. I'm like,

this is one two punch. I'm gonna take them all out this time. You know, they're handling the most trial. Claude was told. Counselor Michoeva in Spanish says they start by attacking the poorest, but from there, they keep picking us off. The city of Boston is not gonna let anyone take away the income of its people. The chair of that here on a paid it very clear. We're gonna listen to everybody. We're gonna take it in the order of testimony. Everybody's gonna get three minutes.

They're gonna be no output. They controlled it here. It's not better. testimony and contributions. And we're gonna transition because we do have a long list to public testimony. So thank you. Thank you so much. After the union it's spoken, everyone else who put their names on the list, not their chance to talk. So Claude, if you do do a study, look at not only how it would negatively impact people, but look how it would positively impact people. Because

to me, a ton of me vehicles, it's not a dystopian future. It is the second side of this story.

people with disabilities and the women with me that day. There must be more accessible, affordable, and reliable transmission. Claude had done his version of what the unions had done so well in the

first round. He summons his own coalition. Hello, my name is Team Nurelli. These were people from

best buddies and organization for people with intellectual disabilities. Dear citizens from Boston's blind community. As a legally blind guide dog user in Boston, I have fewer transportation options than I did 10 years ago. I came from New Hampshire and what I used to call transportation desert where I only had to rely on my family to help me get back and forth to be able to. I felt the room had a almost what I would call a tightness shift. Autonomous vehicles have the

potential to give me and other people with disabilities increased independence, mobility and

“flexibility. Well, I think we can go away the right can't go. There would even a mother”

against drunk driving who broke from one of the panel, right? Autonomous vehicles represent another important tool in the effort to eliminate impaired drive-in. We welcome Waymo. I mean, what are you gonna say to a mother, you don't have a right to want autonomous vehicle for you some doubt? What were you just like feeling watching them talk? So, you know, to be honest with

you, at first I didn't know what I was walking into like to be honest like I thought I was going

to get more of the last go round, but the second hearing they were more strategic and when I started hearing from some of the disability community members, I also felt like some of it was very you know, scripted and I haven't worked in this space understand how you set up all of your advocates to all be on the same message. So I felt like they're all saying the same thing. I've seen this action. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I want to first start off by thanking the public testimony,

“I think to my colleagues earlier point is so important. So, Councillor Mejia, who says which”

he thinks told the room that what she thought she'd just seen was a show, a show put on by Waymo. Benefit from that are not the people that we're trying to serve or the people that we're trying to protect. So I just want to name that that was very poor taste in my personal humble opinion, while I think it's important for us to get that on the record, I think what it did is provide to think the word you use in that hearing is that you said you felt like it was in poor taste.

Why I really just say poor taste? I did. My God, everybody needs therapy after they get done with my hearing's Lord have mercy. So, yeah, I do believe that they are utilizing the disability community to their advantage and you don't do that to people. It's wrong, period. I don't know what I asked this question. It's like slightly delicate, but also I don't want to think I don't, I'm not worried about it. Like Waymo is not an accessibility company. Like it's not

as if they're inventing autonomous vehicles for accessibility reasons. They want to reach a large market. Like accessibility is part of it. It's also the fact of the accessibility issue and the fact of disabled people as allies for them is convenient. Like, do you? Sure, but though it is AARP when they push certain things, right? And they have elderly spoke persons. And yes, it's convenient that the two things align together. And I hear you. And maybe that's the

little selfish for Waymo. But I'm going into this, no one want to get an M2. I know that Waymo is a line in themselves. I'm not going to say you, it's enough. Because I'm not, if you listen to me talk, you can't take advantage of me unless they want to be. Right? So, I know what I'm getting them to when I put them on behalf of autonomous vehicles. I don't care if they make a profit if it means my mobility, my freedom and my independent. Okay, this waymo reaching out to the

blind community. Yes. Are they perhaps given donations to the American Council for the blind? Yes. But the individual time ain't going to done. The money going to non-profit. Right? Organization. So, um, did that answer your question? Yeah, and I don't, it's like, I personally,

“I feel like it's just, it's a question. I feel like I'm being you, if that's what you're getting.”

They never said how to testify. They never want to tell me what they say. They just said,

nobody gave me coaching and I, to my knowledge, the handful of people that I recruited

that testified none of them got coaching either. So, that's Carl's position. Councillor Mejia though, and the room that day was very fired up. Very focused on the target of her eyeer. So, I just want to name that that was very poor taste to utilize folks who are already vulnerable to fight on behalf those who have so much more than any of us here. She directed some very strong words at the man sitting across from her. The man in a suit with gray hair.

Waymo. And I'll start with the CEO maybe. How can we utilize Waymo instead of replacing our

“app drivers to improve the quality of experiences for those folks who have complained?”

I think utilizing Waymo and an autonomous vehicle opens the door for elimination of

practices, illegal practices, discrimination. No, that's not the question. The question is, right? Because you talk about your technology and your ability. Councillor Mejia pressed. She wanted him to answer how could Waymo create new technology that would improve life for blind people without using driverless cars? I have drivers. That's the question. That, I'm not that technology advanced today.

But you're the CEO of a technology company. No, I'm not. No, I'm on the presidency of the Carol Center for the Blinds. Well, I was going to say, Gary, that I am an--

It's just Greg. Greg, oh my God. So somebody gave me the wrong piece of it because they got you

as the CEO of Waymo and the Greg, like my team better get it together. Okay, so let's go back.

“Let me just stay with you real quick, right? I think there is a way guy who had a”

lawsuit. I just made all types of assumptions. Oh my God. So he was going on and on about his stuff. And I think I even think I even said his name wrong. I don't know who he was. And I felt like, you know, when you have egg in your face, like, oh, I had to pick up my face and put it back on because I was like, I'm embarrassing. Because you were giving him a hard time. Him all hard time. Yes, to say to you, I don't work for Waymo. I was like, well, okay, then

I'm still mad at you though. I was embarrassing. Now, you know what it was? It's like because it sounded like he worked for Waymo because he was there advocating fiercely for that community in ways that made me feel like he was part of their team. So yeah, I mean, I was like, okay, you're on the other side of this, but you're not really on the other side because you're sitting

“on the Waymo panel anyway. So you're still part of them. I think that if I try to sympathize with the”

feeling Councilor McGee is expressing here, this is how I understand it. It can be annoying when the other side is a mix of people you're allowed to dismiss out of hand, taking executives, allied with people you're not disability advocates. And when those advocates are all saying similar things, when is your people that sounds like solidarity? When it's them, it can sound phony. It can sound orchestrated. But the whole reason I'd found this fight so fascinating is because I thought it was

one where you really couldn't easily dismiss anybody. For the people who believe driverless cars will save lots of lives, the human beings with jobs are an unignorable fact. For the people who want to protect those jobs, the human beings asking for better accessibility or safer roads are also an unignorable fact. This fantasy that there were blind people who were secret lobbyists was tempting because if that were true, it would mean the world was a simple place.

It's not. The chair Councillor Colletta Zapata said this in the room, pretty explicitly. Nobody'd been paid to be there. I just threw that, but I think for the applicants that have been here and that have provided public testimony, especially maybe from on those in favor of this, I think it's important to say that everybody has their own individual agency and they were here on their own accord. Councillor Colletta Zapata, you can see here in the video, shoulder length brown hair,

big clear glasses. Light Councillor Mejia, she comes from an activist background. As the hearing closed that day, she'd gone from being just the neutral moderator to when it was her turn asking the waymo executive a lot of questions. Questions about jobs, but also just questions about the car. How did it work? What happened when a blind person ordered one? How did they find it? She seemed to be using the hearing to try to get information,

which is how I'd been trying to use the hearing and I wondered if her experience as a participant had been at all like mine as an observer. I just tell you, I don't know if this is a question

I felt like on waymo's side, they were unwilling to engage with the reality of job loss, but on the app driver's union side, I found myself being annoyed because I didn't see them engaging with a question of safety. The idea that these cars could prevent death or that they could be good for disabled people, it was like neither side wanted to, they just kept skipping what to me felt like the core trade-offs here. When you talk about this could be really good or

this could be really bad. Yeah, I saw that too and it's my job, it's all of our jobs as folks that are trying to be thoughtful and take a comprehensive approach to listen to every side

“and that will require a lot of compromise and a lot of consensus, but I think that that's good policy”

making. What do you feel like you need, like if you had a magic wand to just get exactly the information you want to have to be able to make a decision about whether autonomous vehicles are right for Boston, what's the data you'd want to see? I love a magic wand question.

Is it always talks about like the possibility of getting to a place where everybody's happy,

which I don't think it's ever going to happen, but I would be happy to get more data of if we could, if I had a magic wand, how many folks would this employee, how many folks would ultimately lose their job? What would be the exact number of potential crashes or safety incidences on behalf of Waymo and how does that stack up to the existing safety and traffic instances that are already happening in the city of Boston? There's a lot, there's a lot and yeah, how much money is

“Waymo going to make off of this? Because I think that's a central question too, okay, is one company”

is going to benefit and then there could be hundreds of potentially hundreds of workers that are out of a job and what that means for our local economy. And so it bhoves us as legislators to ask these difficult questions and to challenge not just these major corporations but challenge labor unions and to challenge advocacy organizations and to try not to get motivated by our passions. This was the only time in Boston I really heard anyone say this, that to get to a good answer,

every single side would need to be challenged, the finding a solution would be refusing to offer any group blanket difference. I'd now heard the 20-year story of these cars and read the safety data and I'd done my best in Boston to just listen. In general, I wasn't very satisfied with what I'd heard but I appreciated Councillor Collett as about his prescription that everyone tried to calm their passions to ask good questions. And Councillor Mejia for her part said that she would

like to bring all stakeholders to the table including disability activists. Emily and I left Boston

as we zip down I-95 in a human driven car talking about what we'd seen. Here's what things

did back in being down. At the end of the second hearing, the city council had chosen not to vote on the ordinance, the functional waymo ban that many of the council had spent eight hours speaking full throw to support of. It seemed to possible they'd noticed that passing an ordinance that so thoroughly excluded the disability community was not politically wise. The decision on waymo now seems to be moving to the state level. There, we now have competing bills, one that would approve driverus

cars, the other that would require a human being behind the wheel at all times, essentially a ban. Driving home, I had a realization about what we'd seen there. Emily and I had sat for days with different people who all believed they'd glimpse the vision of the future. Obdiazees had a vision of waymo finishing what we were at started taking the market for itself. Carl had a vision of a future where he drove again to the beach with his wife. Councillor Mejia had an ominous vision

where her neighborhood was empty, the people all replaced by machines. Everybody was here in the present, fighting for, fighting against a movie playing in their minds. Here's the vision I see. I started to glimpse it in a conversation with a reporter Timothy B. Lee. We were talking about the future. He was describing his vision of how things were about to change. He pointed out how today, if a robot driver makes a mistake, footage goes viral online. But some day soon, he imagines

will be in a situation where the clips that go viral will be of human beings doing the kinds of

“things on the road that today, which is tolerate. Can you believe this maniac is still out to drive?”

I do think that society is tolerance for bad driving is going to go down. So there's been this trend over the last few decades where the amount of training you need as a teenager is getting a driver's license is big going up. I think that'll continue to go up. And if somebody's caught drunk driving, we're pretty reluctant to take the driver's license away because they live. We had might depend on it. But once driver's taxes are cheap or once you can buy a driver's vehicle,

a driver might be more comfortable saying like the penalty for your first. It's just a

takes wherever you want, but you just can't get behind the wheel.

In Timothy's vision, change comes fast. In about five years, driverless cars are as common as we've heard today. In around 10 years, every new car standard just has a waymo package. A robot driver in sensors, a button, you can press if you don't want to drive.

“A shared Timothy's vision. I believe driverless cars will soon be everywhere.”

Not even just because they're safer, but because of consumer demand, the same force that broke the politician's who resisted Uber out long ago. A lot of AI is like this. Technology too useful to ignore, even if it causes social pain. If we're going to be okay, we're going to need to envision some new futures, new compromises. New ways to share the dividends of progress with the people at this place is.

There are precedents for this. When containerization put a ton of long-sharming out work in the 1960s, the West Coast Union negotiated a deal. The employers could bring in the new machines, but they had to pay into a fund that guaranteed the existing workforce wouldn't be laid off,

“and give early retirement payouts to workers whose jobs disappeared.”

You could do something like that. You could do a lot of things. But whatever we're going to do, I did not find the seeds of that new compromise in Boston. It also does not exist in DC, which has been delaying driverless cars with bureaucratic hurdles. Or in New York, where my governor talked briefly about allowing driverless cars than retreated under pressure.

But these are the places where a bargain could likely be struck. These are where drivers, democrats, and teamsters have for a few more years at least, leverage. They should use it, but they'll have to be inventive. They'll have to imagine visions of the future more vivid than the word "no." [Music]

[Music] That again was PJ Vote, and a special two-part feed drop from the search engine podcast. Let us know what you think. Our email is [email protected]. You can also leave a comment on your favorite podcast app. Big thanks to PJ and his team for sharing the series with us. You can find search engine podcast

on your favorite podcast app. Also, coming up next time on the show, until all cars are autonomous cars, we humans are still in charge. So we look at a new research paper, which finds that driving

“on certain days is particularly dangerous. What days am I talking about?”

Public release days are basically a natural experiment. There are moments where millions of people

suddenly now have a reason to pick up their phone and interact with it sometimes while driving. So, do Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny have blood on their hands? That's next time on the show, until then, take care of yourself. And, if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by RenBud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes. For search engine,

this episode was produced by Emily Maltere. The show was created by PJ Vote and Shruthe Pinnominani. Garrett Graham is their senior producer. Lea Restennis is their executive producer, fact checking was done by Mary Mathis and Sound Design and Original Composition by Armin Bizarrean. Their production intern is Piper Dumont. For Freakonomics Radio, this episode was produced by Dalvin Abwajji and edited by Ellen Frankman. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes

Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne. Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Elaria Montenicourt, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Teo Jacobs, and Zacla Pinsky. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune

by the hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Garra. As always, thanks, Felicity.

in the entire country. I don't even know what walkable means, what is a walkable means? It's like when someone says a book is a page turneric.