Are you a good driver?

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That's mubi.com/surch engine for a whole month of great cinema for free. [Music] Before we start the story today, I want to ask you to imagine a different version of your life. You're you, but it's almost 200 years ago. And unfortunately, I don't know how I have been that at all, it's Monday morning.

“It's Monday morning, and it's very early.”

Predon. You wake up to this really hard wrapping at your window. That's the knockerupper here to get you up for work. We're in the 1800s before the invention of the adjustable alarm clock. The knockerupper is a job.

The knockerupper walks the neighborhood with a long stick and taps it on the windows of people's houses early in the morning to wake them up for work. Who wakes up to the knockerupper for work? Nobody knows. But this is a job.

A job that'll actually exist for another century. Outside the gas street lamps are still burning. The lamplighter lit them the night before. He's supposed to come at dawn to extinguish them, but it's so early that he hasn't yet. Your lamplighter is one of those neighbors you have a deep fondness for.

A fixture. Every day you watch him make the rounds at dusk, at his ladder, at his light. You, yourself, are a driver. Professional driver, 200 years ago, is also a job. You're a person who sits on a coach and holds the reins of a horse.

You take passengers where they want to go. You start your work day. Okay, hypothetical over. Two of those jobs are obviously so long disappeared that most people don't know about them. The knockerupper is your iPhone alarm.

The lamplighter is the electric street light.

The third one, driver, has persisted.

As a job for some, as a routine human task for nearly everyone else. This is a story about whether that's about to change. It's about how the word driver, which right now makes me picture a human, could soon transform to refer to a machine. The same way the words dishwasher, printer, and computer all dead.

I've thought about this maybe too much in the year I've been working on this story. In conversations constantly, I'd ask the humans I met the same question. Are you a good driver? Are you, Juvenessers, have a good driver? I do.

“Within limits, I think I'm a good driver because I understand the limitations of my driving.”

This is Alex Davies. He wrote an excellent book called Driven, The Race to Create the Autonomous Car. Alex, like me, thinks a lot about human driving. About his own personal limitations. What are the limitations?

The limitations are then.

I can't always pay attention to everything that I get tired.

I've been trying really hard to be calmer in the road. My husband and I are expecting our first baby this fall. Congratulations. Thank you, and I thought that along with like reading all the baby books, the good project to work on is just be calmer in the car.

A very good resolution, because of course for most of us, driving is the riskiest behavior we routinely engage in. In fact, even Alex, despite his good intentions, would actually get in a car accident just a few months after we first spoke. He was okay, it was the car that was totaled.

Safety is the entire pitch for the driver of this car, which is really a car driven by a computer. Driverless cars don't get drunk, tired, or distracted.

They never text or feel road rage.

And these driverless cars, they aren't the future, they're actually already here. But it's funny, if you just don't happen to live in a place that already has them, it's

Robotaxes, like Waymo, are operating in 10 American cities, providing millions of rides

to Americans.

“In China, the road is happening even more widely during twice as many cities.”

But here, if you live in a place like San Francisco or Austin, today a driverless car is about as exotic as an Uber. A passenger in those cities opens up their phone and decides who should drive them. A human driver, or a robot driver. How that happened is a story, a story we are living through right now, who's ending

promises to totally reshape the place we live. And today, we're going to tell you how we got here, in chapters. Chapter 1, Dreams Without Drivers. So it turns out this dream that inventors have had to replace the human driver with some kind of machine, that dream is about as old as the lamplighters.

People have been thinking about a self-driving car for, still it's about as long as there has been a human-triven car? Why? There's this funny thing you lose when you move from the horse to a human-triven car, which is said, in a first-drawn carriage, the horse is

“not just kind of run off a cliff if you let go of the reins.”

You lose sentience in your vehicle.

When automobiles first arrived, these powerful and non-sension cars, there's actually a

passionate fight to keep them off the streets. It was the 1800s, and people feared these new things. The steam-powered vehicles thundering down the roads that sort of evolved into gas-powered vehicles, also thundering down the roads. The fear was partly about jobs.

These vehicles were seen as a huge threat to a whole network of working-class jobs. Horse breeders and horse-fairers, horse-feet suppliers, horse manure haulers, horse carriage manufacturers, not to mention the teamsters. Teamsters today, the word makes me think of the teamsters union, but originally the teamsters were the workers who drove teams of horses.

Teamsters were like truckers before we had trucks.

Cars seemed to imperial all these horse-related jobs, and even if you weren't worried about

these workers, the cars were also less safe. Some anti-car activists battled to stop or slow the new technology. Mainly with regulations. There were red flag laws, which said if you had not a mobile, you had to hire a person to walk in front of it, waving a giant red flag to warn people.

In Pennsylvania, a law was proposed requiring horse-list carriage drivers who encountered livestock to stop, disassembled their car, and hide the parts behind the bushelps. The governor vetoed it. But the thing about these crazy anti-car activists, is that they were right. Those cars did initially wipe out a lot of jobs, even if they created more.

And cars were very unsafe. The cities that threw their doors open to cars without regulation were rewarded with astonishing death rates. To try it, let drivers pretty much run wild. In the early 1900s, deaths accumulated, in a Detroit without driver's licenses, stoplates

or turn signals. Many of those deaths were children. It took decades for society to mostly learn to live with cars. The rest of the story is just the world you grew up in. We invented laws, licenses, drivers, and we learned to better design roads.

We invented the highway, the seat belt, the airbag. All those things made driving less deadly, although the smartphone reversed some of that progress. Nationally today, deaths from cars are about as common in America as deaths from guns or opioids.

Without one in a hundred, it'll probably happen to someone you know in your life. Maybe several summons. Whether or not you see that as an urgent problem to solve depends on you. But as long as there have been cars, there have been people who wanted to truly solve

“what's left of the safety problem, the best way we knew how.”

They wanted to make the car more like the horse it replaced. Make the car more sensiant. So that thought is there early and like early visions of it include, "Oh, well, we'll have radio controlled cars because they had radios at the time." There's a real effort at one point to build magnets under the road.

And at each stage, what a self driving car can be is dictated by the technology that's available at the time from the most part. No one's thinking that much about a vehicle that thinks for itself. They're just thinking about a vehicle that the person in it doesn't have to drive. Many different attempts, many different failures.

As many wonders as we invented, we did not approach natures, most majestic creation,

Deep within the Department of Defense, there's a little no military agency that has created some of the most innovative technology of the 20th century. This is the story of DARPA. DARPA's million dollar prize DARPA's current goal is to develop autonomous military vehicles, machines that can operate on their own without drivers.

“This is from a documentary called the Million Dollar Challenge, honestly less a doc,”

more an ad for DARPA, the Pentagon's Research Arm. DARPA's mission is to try to keep American technology one generation ahead of everybody else.

It doesn't always work, but DARPA has invented or funded a lot.

GPS and the M16, thoroughly internet and the predator drone. In 2002, DARPA decided to pursue the driverless car in a very unusual way. The director of DARPA at the time, a guy named Tony Teather, who had been a door-to-door salesman in his use, definitely has that flare in that way of thinking, says, "Let's have a contest. Let's see who can put all of these ingredients that we've developed together into a proper

self-driving car." His original idea is, "We'll try from down the Las Vegas strip, but it's almost immediately next because it's insane." Oh, right. You would have to like literally gridlock a huge American city so people could put robot cars

on it. Exactly. So he says, "Okay, do you know what? We'll do it in the desert. We'll do it in the desert, outside Las Vegas, and anyone who wants to can make a team,

build a self-driving car, bring it to the desert, and all race them." The driver that DARPA wanted to replace was the American soldier. DARPA wanted a vehicle that could drive itself down roads that might be filled with hidden explosive devices. So in this moment, at the tail end of the dot com boom, DARPA's trying to inspire tech

to build something besides another website. DARPA's Tony Tether announces that the prize for whoever can win its grand challenge will be $1 million. The rules for very open. There were literals, like you couldn't have two vehicles communicating with one another,

but you could build any kind of vehicle you wanted. Can have six wheels. It could be a truck. It could be a motorcycle. It could be a tricycle.

It just couldn't attack other vehicles. That was rolled out early on.

“Oh, was that a concern that people would just like, sort of, battle-bought the thing?”

And your autonomous vehicle would have a little shredder that would take out somebody else's. Someone asked, in the first Q&A, at this, like, they said, "Can we attack other vehicles?" They said, "No." And it's funny, you bring a battle-boughts because a lot of teams who entered this had battle-boughts history, interesting.

They were used to building robots for interesting purposes. And when they caught wind of this, they said, "We can do this. We can scrap together some money, and this will just be fun." I'm going to tell you what happened in this robot race in the desert, not because I care so much about these early robot vehicles, but because I care a lot about the engineers

who were making them.

These would be the people who would later go on to lead development for the billion-dollar

companies creating today's drive-roast cars. And these people had very different views about how to get that technology ready. And values, when it came to things like the acceptability of risking human life. Abstract differences have become very concrete later on. So the point where people would be charged with federal crimes, that's the future.

But listening to this part of the story, what I listen for is how much of it can you detect already, how much of the differences are already present. The first engineer I want you to pay attention to is a man named Chris Armsen.

“Coming way back in 2002, how did you end up being part of the DARPA ground challenge?”

Um, it sounded like fun. Chris, these days the CEO of a large tech company, back then a PhD student at Carnegie Millenew University.

When he first got recruited for the race, he was out in the field, observing a robot as

it crept across the Otacama Desert, training for its future deployment on the surface of Mars. He had to be a advisor came down and was really excited about this DARPA ground challenge thing and the idea that you'd have a robot run across the desert at 50 miles an hour, just sounded exciting.

Having spent the last couple of weeks walking behind a robot at very low speed. So Chris would join Carnegie Millenew Red team and help build a car called Sandstorm, a bright

Like Scanners, a crackpot would use search for aliens.

You can see Chris back in that documentary. He explains to the filmmaker at the time that the hard part of course isn't the vehicle, it's the driver.

“How do you even begin to teach a computer to operate a Humvee at all?”

How does a computer make the steering wheel turn, how does a computer change the pressure on the brake and the throttle, those are the issues that we're fighting through right now? The answer. Sandstorm represented the best entry from the contest's traditional academic crowd, but there's a different crowd there too, represented best by a man named Anthony Levin-Dowsky.

Can you tell me about Anthony Levin-Dowsky? Anthony Levin-Dowsky, where did it begin? So Anthony is like an entrepreneur. He's a really charming guy. He's six foot six, he's gangly, has all get out.

He grew up mostly in Belgium because his mom was working for the EEO for a high school he moved to Marin to live with his dad and he's a hustler. My name is Anthony Levin-Dowsky, I was a grad student at Berkeley, instead of continuing on to finish my PhD, I decided there was much better to do the grand challenge. We asked Anthony for an interview, he didn't respond, but here he is in the footage from

back then, Anthony did not have the engineering experience or resources of a team like Carnegie Mellon's red team, so he tried something very different, a vehicle that had almost no chance of winning the race, but which was also perfectly designed to stand out to get a lot of attention, maybe a job. The race is only self-driving motorcycle, it was named Ghost Rider, a stubby little thing,

covered in stickers, but then in 10 on the back and cameras on the front. There's a steering actuator on the top here, which allows us to modify the steering angle.

So basically, if you're driving, you start to fall the left, you steer the left, that makes

you turn the left and then you get the triple acceleration to put you back up to the right. And you monitoring that in real time and making small adjustments and you stay bounce. It is on the command from the tower is to move, ladies and gentlemen, sandstorm. The race happens on a Saturday in March of 2004.

Autonomous vehicle traversing the desert with the goal of keeping our young military personnel out of harm's way.

“What happens the first time they try to do this competition?”

The 2004 Grand Challenge is an utter hysterical disaster. Disaster number one, Ghost Rider, the motorcycle, anti-11 Dowski, forgot to flip on the switch for the stableization system, the bike immediately topples. Like one vehicle drives up onto a berm flip-suff. One vehicle drives straight out, does an inexplicable e-turn and just drives back to the

starting line. And the rules are that once your vehicle starts, you can't do anything. Even sandstorm got stuck on a berm. Chris Armstrong's in just standing there, unable to help his robot. Of course things were trying to get going, but its wheels were just spinning on the gravel

and tried so hard that it actually melted the rubber of the tires and so this is flumes of black smoke before they killed it. For the roboticists, this was obviously very disappointing. Chris Armstrong's in compared it to an Olympic marathon where the best runner only makes it two of the 26 miles.

But this contest had done though, was it had flushed all these inventors out. It had jumped started the scene that would develop the technology.

“One of the most important people there that day actually just watching was someone I haven't”

mentioned yet. A legendary roboticist named Sebastian Thrun.

Sebastian Thrun, he was at the first grand challenge.

He didn't bring a team, he wasn't participating. Garrett wanted to show off some other projects they've been funding, including one of his robots so he brings the robot and so he's there and he watches this this as if there are anything I can do better than this. I looked at the very first iteration of this grand challenge but it didn't participate

it was a spectator. This of course is Sebastian Thrun. He grew up in West Germany, moved to the US, taught at Carnegie Mellon before moving to Stanford. Watching that day, he saw this fundamental error he believed all the entrance had made.

He saw that all the teams treated this like a harder problem.

so on.

“And I looked at this and said about wait a minute.”

The challenge really is to build a self-driving carer that can drive for the desert. I can get a rental car, they can do it just fine, provide there's a person inside and the challenges we need to take the person out of the driver seat and replace the back computer. That is not a problem of bigger tires, that's actually videos of the problem.

Sebastian Thrun had a dual background, robotics and artificial intelligence, which probably explains his focus here on the robot driver's mind. He was thinking about something else too. The military wanted this tack to replace a relatively small number of drivers in its war zones, but Sebastian was already imagining something bigger.

What would happen to traffic deaths? Worldwide. One day everyone had access to a driverless car. I had experiences of losing people in my life to traffic accidents, and I felt we lost

over the million people in the world to traffic accidents, wouldn't it be amazing if

“that we've invented something they would save a million lives a year?”

In October of 2005, 43 teams have brought their vehicles to compete in a unique event. A race driven not by testosterone, but computer code. Chapter 3. Machine. Learning.

The race course is a circular maze that zigzags for 132 miles. 18 months later. For the second grand challenge, DARPA doubled the bounty, $2 million dollars. This footage is from a PBS documentary called The Great Robot Race, narrated to my mild joy by John Liskow.

Familiar faces have returned. Chris Armson, back with the Carnegie Mellon team, the time with two vehicles, Highlander and Sandstorm. Anthony Levendowski, back with his motorcycle, which still doesn't work, is knocked out in the qualifiers.

And now there's also Stanford's entrant. Compared to Sandstorm, the bulked up Hummer, the car looks measly, a blue SUV donated by Volkswagen, a baby faced run smiles next to his soccer mom looking vehicle. The vehicle's name is Stanley, so Stanley is nothing else but Stanford, but it also gives the vehicle the post-netlity.

We think of the vehicle more and more as an intelligent decision maker. And run really broad, more artificial intelligence, which at the time we're talking 2005, was still rather primitive, especially compared to what we have today, but he could use it to teach his vehicle how to recognize the road and how to do it much faster. They found a dirt road, out near Stanford, and they drive it down a dirt road, and have

the cars cameras record what they were seeing. The robot's standing was able to train itself, as it went in the way to work this, his eyes looked way ahead and it could see stuff way at distance. When it drives over the stuff, he could tell it was a good place to drive an object, because it could measure how slippery or how bumpy the road was.

And then you could then retroactively train and say, "This green stuff over there is something good to drive on, aka grass, and this brownish stuff, aka mud is not so good to drive."

“And so it was able to detect patterned and generalize from what it had learned?”

Yeah, absolutely.

And it did this like 30 times a second, I mean, just like a person.

The race kicks off with Stanley sandwiched between Carnegie Mellon's two behemoths. My lander leeds the pack, followed by Stanley and Sandstone. What happens in the second race? The second race is as successful as the first race is disastrous. Nearly every entry in the second race would go further than Sandstone had in the first.

Multiple vehicles would finish the course. The real question was who would do it fastest? And so at what point was it clear to you that you were going to win? Well, once we pass the front running team, we kind of saw the vehicle descend into over the hardest part of the race course, a very, very treachery mountain pass.

And we saw, at a distance, a dust cloud, we saw a helicopter, we saw a little feature that may, must believe, wow, there's something happening, there's magical. And this dust cloud then all of a sudden turned blueish because the covers blue and came closer. And then it came first through the finish line, it was unbelievable, magical.

At the end of the dock, over some criminally corny piano music, Sebastian Theron gives his post-rac interview. He's dressed a lot like a race car driver, lodging, you could forget he wasn't in the car.

It was just amazing to see this community of people.

That community succeeded today. Behind me, there are three robots that made all the way through the desert and all three of them did the unthinkable.

I made for TV Kumbaya Moment, still years before the race to build driverless cars would enter its cutthroat phase.

“What would happen next is that a small band of lunatics would take driverless cars out of”

the desert, start secretly driving them on public roads in the state of California. They would do this at the behest of a man who'd been observing from the stands that day, disguised in hat and sunglasses who'd watched the challenge was mine spun. That's just a short break. From the top of the mountain, the car was a bit too expensive.

With Stepstown All-Jobs, they all came for one year, in one package, to a fixed price. They're so far up to 75% cost and are all-in-one flexible. Now, let's start with Stepstown.

Stepstown is the most important talent for all-jobs.

If you ever felt like you were living just a B or B+ life, it's so dangerous to live that more dangerous than a B-minus or a C+ life, because we've done a lot of things. So we've got a lot of things to do, so we've got a lot of things to do, so we've got a lot of things to do, so we've got a lot of things to do, so we've got a lot of things to do. Stepstown is to live that more dangerous than a B-minus or a C+ life, because we're living

a B or B+ life, you don't change it, you think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called "Becoming You."

“People think okay, and A+ life is not available to me, but there is a way.”

We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to becoming you wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the show, Chapter 4, something actually useful for the world. The race in the desert had been designed as a spectacle, something flashy to dry out America's smartest roboticists, but it had drawn another person who'd come for his own reasons.

Google's Larry Page arrived at the DARPA Grand Challenge in a baseball hadn't sunglasses, and disguised.

He found Sebastian Thron and Button Holden, asking him a million highly specific questions

about things like the wavelength his light are system used. But this meeting in the desert, this was not actually their first introduction. By the first time I met Larry, it was a bit earlier, he had built a small little robot that acted as a tailor presence for meetings, and he was trying to drive it around. The Google offices instead of himself going to meet with a robot, and he sent me a message

and said, "I'm going to show you the robot I've built." And in the spirit of like craziness, I send the message back saying, "Larry, I'm so glad that Google lets you use 20% of your time, do something useful for the world." [laughter]

I call that a thing, I either expect a rapid response or never hear from him again.

It turns out I was lucky. He responded immediately, "I took his robot and fixed it next 24 hours and he was very happy." [music] Larry Page had actually been interested in autonomous vehicles since at least grad school.

“That's what he'd wanted to do his thesis on, before being guided by some wise PhD advisor”

toward search engines instead. Now, as a spectator at DARPA's Second Grand Challenge, he can see real world evidence that autonomous vehicles might actually be a thing. At first, Larry Page hires Sebastian Thron, along with fellow DARPA contestants Anthony Levin Dowski, just to build what will become Google Street View.

To actually modify the system that Stanley, the car's roof mounted cameras had used to begin photographing American streets. But before long, Larry Page returns to Sebastian, with his dream of a driverless car. And so, how soon after arriving at Google this project show for a weekend, Larry Page says to you, "I have a mission, like how does this happen?"

And this is an embarrassing moment for me, it's about two years later, 2009, where I sit in my cubicle, and Larry Page comes by and says Sebastian, "I think you should build

And my immediate reaction was, no, taking the technology we built for this empty desert and putting it in the middle of market street in San Francisco is going to kill somebody. And Larry would come back the next day with the same idea, and I would give them the same answer, and both of us got increasingly more frustrated, like, "God damn it, it can be done."

And eventually came and said, "Look, Sebastian, okay, I get it, you don't want me to can do it." I want to explain to Eric Schmidt, the CEO at the time, and Sergei Brady, my co-founder, "Why it can be done? Can you give me the technical reason why it can't be done?"

And that's the moment of incredible pain, because I go home and I can't think of a technical

reason why not. That was this kind of moment where I felt, "Look, I'm the world expert on self-driving cars." And I'm the person who denies that it can be done, like that, that taught me an incredibly

“important lesson about experts, that, for the rest of my life, I decided, experts are usually”

actually the past, not the future. And if you ask an expert about innovation, something crazy new, there's at least like the person to say, "Yes, it can be done." So this is where the Google Self-driving car project begins in 2009. It's led by Sebastian joined by others from the DARPA challenges.

The methodical Chris Armstrongson was running most things day-to-day, Anthony Levin-Dowsky, the flashy motorcycle guy, would work on hardware. Demetri Dorgave, another DARPA veteran, would be responsible for planning and optimization. It was a secret project. They report directly to Larry Page, a small enough team that there'd be no bureaucracy,

few emails, fewer meetings, just 11 engineers who, writer Alex Davies, says, represented some of the best young talent in the country. And so Google builds this very quiet team, and it says to them, "Build us the self-driving car." And because that goal is super-nebulous, they give them two challenges.

They say, "Safely log 100,000 miles on public roads, but they also give them a challenge called the Larry One King." So Larry and Sergey and I said together, and the two of them carved out 1,000 total miles of road surface in California. They open up Google Maps, and they just click around, and they look for 10 separate 100

mile routes that are really tricky, absolutely everything, like the Bay Bridge, and Lake Town, and Highway 1 to Los Angeles, and Market Street, and even Crooked Lombard Street.

“And they say to the team, "You have to drive each of these 100 mile routes without one”

human takeover of the system, without one failure of the car." To get off to a running start, the team licenses the code from Sanford's DARPA Urban Challenge Vehicle. Anthony 11 Daoski goes to a local Toyota dealership, and buys eight Priests, takes them back to Google, and retrofits them to accept a computer as a driver.

He hooks that computer driver electronically into the brakes, the gas, the steering. These Priests get a radar system behind the bumper, cameras, a light-ar system, spending 360 degrees on top, light-ar, like radar, but it shoots lasers instead of soundways.

At first, the team gives each Priests a cool name, like Night Rider.

But I think we quickly realized that we're not going to be able to name all these vehicles as we scale up our fleet, and so we just started to number them, like, you know, Priests 87. This is Don Burnett. He'd been a researcher at working on autonomous submarines.

He also friend in a car accident, separately got in a bad accident himself, and decided he wanted to do work on self-driving cars.

“That's how he eventually ended up on the team in its early days.”

I was on the motion planning a behavior decision making team, and my responsibility was to work on the nudging behavior. Nudging when a big truck passes a human driver on the right, the driver will nudge a little to the left. For us it's an instinct, Don's job was to teach a computer to nudge. I'm trying to encode the behavior that you would use as a driver under kind of partially

good perception, and it's a really tricky problem. A team of academic roboticists, some of whom had had friends dying cars, spending Google's money to see if they could make driving safer. It was a weird era. There's this big concert venue near Google's offices called the Shoreline Empathieter.

In 2009 you could have seen Cheryl Crow there, The Killers, Fish. But the most interesting show that year was one almost nobody knew about. In the venue parking lot, on days when there was no concert, their tourbuses around to see them.

The Google team would run its first test runs after driverless cars, essentially hiding

in plain sight. Prius, driving itself around the amphitheater parking lot with an attentive safety driver sitting behind the wheel just in case.

car that the computer in the car was abiding by their orders.

“These were the baby steps that happened in this parking lot and at an empty airplane runway”

in this close to their offices.

Spring 2009, the team tries actual real road driving for the first time.

Their sermons and takes one of the Prius' out on the central expressway. Speed limit, 45 miles per hour, there are humans driving here. And immediately outside the confines of the empty parking lot and the empty airplane runway, here's what's clear. They had a real problem.

The car was swerving wildly. It was even around like a drunk and sailor. And we realized that the scale of the runway was such that you didn't notice the one or two foot kind of oscillation it had in lateral control and you put it on central expressway and suddenly, you know, yep, turns out actually that's a problem.

One more problem to fix.

Listening to the story, it's funny because I can imagine it giving me a totally different

feeling than it does, a tech company with nobody's permission was testing driverless cars on public roads in California. I don't know why that strikes me as being about invention instead of just hubris and impunity. Maybe it's because I know that Google would be one of the few tech companies whose driverless cars would not cause any fatal accidents and testing.

And that the team would just take more safety precautions than the other companies who'd rush in later to catch up with them, once this was an arms race. In the way these cars were designed, the safety driver set behind the steering wheel, ready to take over. In the other seat was their partner, watching the monitor displaying a graphical interface,

designed by the Demetri Dolgav. The people watching the screen would call out problems ahead, some discrepancy between what the sensors were seeing and what was actually in the road. This is what teaching a car to drive actually looks like. Two person team is manning the cars, logging errors, going back to the office to troubleshoot

and then updating the code. I asked Don Burnett about the Sarah. And while you're doing this and then like you leave work and you get in your car, the huge drive as a human, did you find yourself thinking more carefully like, how do I know what I know and I'm driving?

Like you're trying to teach a machine by day, did it affect how you thought about human driving by night? Almost obnoxiously so to any passengers in the car with me, I was obsessed with one big

“question, which is why do humans drive the way they drive?”

And it turns out there were no good answers and I still think they're not great answers and instead of actually answering that question, we've just turned a machine learning to infer the detrudes behind why humans do what they do. And so there's some basic principles that you can understand like we try to minimize lateral acceleration meaning you don't want to be thrown to the outside of your car when you're

making a turn. So you're going to slow down. So you're trying to figure out the right speed and angle for the car on one of those tight, curvy on ramps onto the highway, you want it to feel comfortable for a passenger.

Don says you can work out the math, the lateral acceleration is two meters per second

squared, but the surprising thing is that number only applies on the on ramp. If I put you at a cold assac in a neighborhood and you were going to do a U-turn at the end of the cold assac, even though the speed is significantly slower, if you did two meters per second squared of lateral acceleration around a cold assac, you would tell your driver they were crazy, it would be more readily uncomfortable, like incredibly uncomfortable.

You would feel like you were at Mario Kart. Yes, it would feel Mario Kart.

“But in remember, this is a force, so it's a physical feeling on your body is exactly”

the same, but the contextual awareness of the situation of speeding up to get on the highway versus making a U-turn in a residential street, tricks your brain into feeling opposite about the situation. And so it turns out the limit for a cold assac is around 0.75. It's almost three times less than you would be willing to tolerate as you accelerate on to

a highway. And so there were things like that where you couldn't just say humans have specific physical restrictions, right from a force's perspective, the context matters. And when the context matters, now I'll have said anything as a game, so things like that is where I spent my time as a researcher trying to figure out how we're going to make

this comfortable for passengers. All these little problems to solve, but there's one gift, which is that the team at this

The DARPA challenge to tell them drive across this patch of desert, the Larry one K challenge

“told them drive these 10 roots without human intervention.”

The specificity of the mission meant they never had to squabble about why they were there.

By 2010, just a year and the team was really on a roll. They start knocking out roots, each one of the routes was unique and distinct and different and had its own challenges, downroot one, Silicon Valley to Carmel. The bridges run, where we had to go across all of the bridges in the bay area, starting in Mountain View, finishing crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.

It's Chris Armstrong sent in the cards, Anthony Levin-Dowski in the car. I was in the car with Dimitri Chris and Anthony, who was the four of us in the Prius. They were figuring out the technology much faster than they thought they could. The Larry one K was set up like a video game, meaning they'd get to try the route over and over until they could complete it without a single human takeover, then they'd move

on to the next one.

It was really a proof of concept exercise.

Can you even make this happen once? When they fail a route, they know what the car can't handle, so they go back and say, "You have to be better at doing X, Y, and then we got back to the office. We regrouped.

“We went back out, I think, at 11 p.m. and by 1 a.m. we had completed the route."”

They buy a bottle of Corbell Champaign. They all write their names on it, Corbell 1399 of bottle. The Champaign they have at Trader Joe's. They had one for every route, they completed it. And one by one, they pick off the Larry one K routes, and they think this is going to take

them about two years when they start out, and they do it in a little bit more than a year. Nearly twice as fast as they had expected. By fall of 2010, they're done. Here's Chris Ermson. And I think we had a big party up at Sebastian's house in Los Alters Hills, so it was pretty

spectacular, right? They throw each other in the pool, they celebrate, and then they're not entirely sure what to do next. It was kind of okay, and now what? The team had pulled off a kind of miracle in a year, a driverless car with human supervision

with lots of human coding, but still, a driverless car successfully navigating some very tricky roads in California. They done this safely, they done it quickly, and now things would begin to wobble. The petition would arrive, the team itself would begin to skism, and one member, a person who believed that the team was moving too slowly, would actually take matters into his

own hands in a particularly extreme way. After the break, muting. Welcome back to the show. As early as 2010, Google's driverless car project had developed some very impressive self-driving technology, but what they were struggling to decide was this, what was the actual product

they were developing here? Here's the Bastion Throne. We had a lot of debates inside Google, but the right business model was, at some point we

actually had a big debate, we should just buy Tesla, and Tesla was worth $2 billion at the time,

I remember this. Maybe we should have in hindsight. But the joke inside here, there was a debate whether this is more of an assistive technology or a disruptive replacement technology. Basically, should they follow the route that Tesla ultimately would, design self-driving as

“a feature in your car, something that could take over sometimes, but still need human monitoring?”

Or was it better to wait until the car could fully drive itself? Throne would eventually come around to this version of self-driving, specifically he'd come around to the idea of self-driving robo taxis. A taxis service type system is way more capital efficient than ownership, and owned cars being used for 4% of the time, and it's parked in the 1960s, and imagine a city without

parked cars, where every car is being utilized, called it's 50% of the time, which means we have only 10% of the number of cars needed that we need today when we own own cars. That's going to happen. There's no question. What Sebastian is describing here, so matter of factly, is a fairly radical reimagination

of American cities. The idea that robo taxis would be so cheap and widely available that most people just wouldn't own cars that we could put something else, anything else, in the places where

Just given how much of American identity is tied into personal car ownership, a far-fetched

idea, and for it to begin to happen, Google would have to bring a product to market. But the years passed, and they didn't, and some people who were there felt stuck. Don Burnett says he believes life at Google got dangerously cushy. The food was great, the money was too. These former academics making much more than they'd ever expected.

There was a lack of urgency on the team to actually make something viable. We had a funding supply that effectively felt infinite, and maybe it was, maybe it wasn't but it's certainly felt infinite. And when you have infinite funding, you're not forced to make hard decisions. You're not forced to focus.

You're not forced to look at the opportunity, the market, the customer, and be the best.

It was more like, "Hey, let's take our time. Let's make sure we do it right," which is, on its face, a good principle.

“But at the end of the day, I think the lack of urgency wasn't for everyone.”

Within the team, you get Team Chris and Team Anthony, and they start budding heads all the time. Chris and Anthony, meaning Chris Ermsen, a official head of the project, versus Anthony Levin Dowski, who I still think of as the motorcycle guy. The main difference in their approach is how quickly they want to move. Anthony is very okay with risk, full saying.

He gets one of these cars, and he's driving it back and he lives in Berkeley, works in Colorado. He's just using this car on the Bay Bridge every day, probably outside the bounds of what the team actually wanted, and he's not necessarily logging data. He's just enjoying himself driving cars, taking it all over the place.

Chris comes from an academic background. He's that Canadian, very nice, very careful, very risk-averse. When I asked Chris Ermsen about all this, his memory was slightly different. In his memory, Team Anthony was pretty much just Anthony, and Anthony he said was a move fast and break things kind of guy.

Move fast and break things. A motto famously coined by Mark Zuckerberg, "It defines a way of developing technology which

once might have felt cute and revolutionary, but which today, at least to me, feels pretty

irresponsible." Chris didn't think that philosophy was an option for their team. Even if their cars were statistically safer than human drivers, he knew that the first news story about a self-driving car in a fatal accident was going to be a huge deal. Anne Octote was going to demolish data if they weren't extremely careful.

By all accounts, Anthony 11-Dowski felt differently, but he actually wasn't the only one. Here's Don Bernat. There were some people on the team, very famously, including myself that started to get the itch kind of towards the three to four-year mark. The itch of like, "Okay, where is this going?

Who is it four? How are they going to use it? Where are they going to use it?" And I felt like the leadership didn't have great answers to that. There was no commercial race, right?

We had no competition and there was no market for the product. But competition would soon arrive in the form of Uber. This was the oh shit moment from me, Uber announced their self-driving program.

“And I remember, like it was yesterday, waking up, reading the news, going to my desk in”

the morning and thinking, "Oh crap, these guys are going to heat our lunch." In 2013, then CEO of Uber, Travis Calenek, had gotten a ride in one of Google's prototype driverless cars. Sitting in a taxi without a human driver, he'd understood that this could be the end of his company.

And to Uber had plunged headlong into the driverless car race. The company hired nearly half of Carnegie Mellon's top robotics lab. And not long after, we also know, through court records and emails, that Uber also began communicating with Anthony 11 Daoske, who, in 2016, would leave Google, quitting just before he could be fired for recruiting team members away, including Don Bernat.

He would then start his own autonomous vehicle company, Uber, would soon buy that company for almost $700 million. Even though the company had no product and was only months old. Which raised a mystery.

“Why would Uber pay so much for a company who's only assets seem to be its people?”

This is where Google goes into its computer security logs and realizes that not long before he left Anthony 11 Daoske downloaded something like 14,000 technical files. On to his computer and move them on to an external disc, obviously you can't do that.

No, you definitely cannot do that.

“And this is the kind of thing that maybe if you had stayed there, this is the kind of thing”

Anthony would have done. Anyone would have been like, oh, it's just so I could have access to it somewhere else. Any probably would have gotten away with it. But when you then go and work for Uber and start running their direct competitor self-driving car program, that's when you get in trouble.

And that's when what's technically called Wemow at this point, Google's program sues Uber and puts Anthony at the center of an enormous legal battle between these tech giants. The secrets and sub diffusion in Silicon Valley, a former Google engineer has been charged with stealing files from out for that self-driving car project and taking them to Uber. Specifically, it involves a former lead engineer of Google's self-driving car unit, Anthony

11 Daoske. Now he's accused of using his personal laptop and downloading more than 14. In 2016, Google had just spun its driverless car unit into a new entity, Wemow.

Wemow sued Uber, Uber had to settle to the tune of $245 million dollars, and in a separate

criminal trial, Anthony 11 Daoske put guilty to stealing trade secrets. Afterwards, Uber continues their driverless car program without him, continuing to pursue its move fast, break thing the strategy, which in 2018 leads to the death of a woman named Elaine Hurtspirk. Uber is sitting the brakes on its self-driving cars after one of them hit and killed a woman

in Arizona. The vehicle was in Autonomous mode, but it did have a safety driver on board, but a police report later indicating the safety driver was streaming TV shows on her phone for three hours that night, including at the time of the crash. The way the story was reported nearly everyone blamed the safety driver.

She was on her phone, she was streaming an episode of the voice. Tempe investigator saying "had Vaskas been paying attention to the road, she could have stopped the car 42 feet before impact, the NTSB slamming Uber."

“There was some important additional context, which was that Uber's robot driver was”

also just much worse than way most. A statistic I found job dropping. At this point, way most safety drivers were having to take over from the car once every 5,600 miles. Uber's safety driver sat here, had it intervene more than once every 13 miles.

Despite that, five months before the crash, over employee objections, Uber had cut its safety crews. Instead of two humans, they just used one. One safety driver overseeing a robot driver that was arguably not ready to be on public roads.

In the last moments of lean herdsburg's life, the robot spent an indefensible 5.6 seconds trying and failing to guess the shape in the road that was a human body pushing a bike. One of those 5.6 seconds, the robot kept reclassifying her, pushing a known object, a vehicle, a bicycle, during that time spent wondering, the car did not slow down. Soon after Elaine Hertzberg's death, Uber halted its testing program.

Uber has temporarily suspended its driverless fleet nationwide as the NTSB, police, Uber, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigate. We reached out to Uber for common, a spokesperson said that the fatal collision was indeed a tragedy, which had a significant impact on Uber, and the entire industry. There would be other competitors who would shut down after similar accidents.

There would also be Tesla, which by 2020 was publicly marketing a product the company called full self-driving, but which absolutely was not. Meanwhile, Waymo had slowly continued to develop its tech. Their robot taxis would be ready for riders by 2020. The team had gotten an unexpected boost from a technology that was at the time very little

understood. In 2026, when most people talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation defaults to products like ChatGVT and Quad, but artificial intelligence has been a core part of driverless car going back to two decades. In the 2010s, neural net advances meant that you could now begin to feed a computer system

large amounts of data and watch as its perception, prediction, and decision-making abilities improved. Here's the fashion trend. That technology of massive data training was with us from the get-go, but has become

“more and more and more and more important.”

The surprise for all of us has been that size matters.

When you put a million documents into an AI, it's fine, a hundred million is fine,

so if you put a hundred billion documents into an AI, it is a million smart, and then a thing shocked everybody, my seven tutors.

car team to use training data to help the computer drive or learn things, like how to

“better predict one another car was about to suddenly switch lines, how to more reliably”

spot pedestrians. Over the years, as the car drove more miles, as the team gathered more data, plugged that data into the AI systems and tweaked the systems, the engineers say the robot driver kept improving. As they tested the car in new weather conditions, it discovered problems that required hardware

fixes. For instance, in Phoenix, Waymo had to design miniature wipers for their car's lid or sensors to deal with the dust storms and heavy rains.

In 2020, Waymo finally debuts to the public in Arizona.

In the years after, it will roll out to 10 more American cities. A funny consequence of Waymo's long development cycle is that the public's attitude towards Silicon Valley has just really changed in that time. There's more suspicion towards Google than there was back in 2009 when the project first started.

And so now, many people look at the Waymo driver with a raised eyebrow, with a question immediately on their lips. Chapter 5 Are you a good driver?

“All right, autonomous vehicles can now get you around Atlanta yesterday during driving through”

Austin. It's here. Except it comes without a driver. A fleet of white electric Jaguars covered in 40 different sensors. Cameras, radar, lidar, it's an expensive car, as much as $150,000 by some estimates.

In the news stories you see the inside, where the human driver would normally set, there's empty seat. You're not allowed in. With a steering wheel in front of it, a studio that turns itself. Cars without drivers are here.

It sounds like something out of the jet zones, but get ready because you may look over at the car next to you and see it rolling down the street.

The TV newscasters always use the same G-Wiz tone.

They can never resist the jet zones reference. In every city, the influencers happen to record testimonials for their daily serving of cloud. So in today's video, I'm about to take my first ever driverless car. It's with an app called Waymo.

Mo is basically driverless car over, where it's like a red service to you, call it, go wherever you need it to go, but there's no driver. You guys, this is creepy. It's like I'm being driven around by a ghost person. It's a little terrifying.

It is definitely. Rogo Taxi's pull hilariously badly. According to JD power, I data analytics firm among people who've not ridden in one. Consumer confidence is at 20%. But among people who have taken a ride, they number shoots up to 76%.

It's a thing I didn't capture in this story. But when I sat in one a couple years ago, I just found it persuasive as an experience. You know what? I'm not as nervous as I thought I was going to be. This is actually quite relaxing.

A gradual turn felt very safe. You know, it was kind of freaky at first, but now it's pretty chill. It's a smooth ride though. It went driving fast. It went jerking.

It's driving like you always hope your Uber driver would.

So I guess that's one of the big sellers. Chris Irmsen, that methodical team leader, had left Google years ago. But he told me about his experience as a civilian consumer, trying away him out in the world. My universal experience has been, and you can tell me if this was your experience. The first couple of minutes in the vehicle, it's ha.

That's crazy. There's nobody behind the wheel, who's flipping the sharks. And then a few minutes in, it's like, okay, you know, it's just going to drive. Is that all it does? And then, you know, ten minutes and people are looking at their phone.

“People tend to feel safe in these cars, but are they, actually?”

So we know that the Waymo driver has now driven over 200 million real world miles. And they really safety data so far for the first 127 million miles. Waymo's fairly transparent. They release their crash and safety data, unredacted to the public. By contrast, Tesla redacts the details of its crashes.

The company says they are confidential business information. In Waymo's case, I've looked at the data. I've looked at how the company interprets it, how skeptical, independent researchers interpret it. I wanted to walk through it with an autonomous vehicle reporter I trust. His name is Timothy Bealey, author of the newsletter, understanding AI.

I ask him how much are picture of the Waymo safety data has been evolving. So it's been pretty consistent the last couple years. They are scaling up and so all the numbers get bigger, like the total number of miles. Get bigger, the number of crashes get bigger, but the like crashes per mile have not changed a ton.

Waymo says, and I think this is correct that it's roughly 80% safer in terms of crashes. We are enough to trick on airbag crashes, severe enough to cause an injury, and also crashes involving vulnerable road users like pedestrians or bicyclists. So 80% fewer airbag crashes than human drivers, and actually 90% fewer crashes that cause

Some independent experts have small quibbles with the methodology, but broadly they find waymo's data credible.

“Timothy pointed out there's one very important thing we don't know, the fatal crash comparison.”

For every 100 million miles human drive, we cause a little over one fatal crash.

The Waymo driver has driven 200 million miles without causing a fatal crash, but statistically speaking, that can still be a fluke. Some academics have suggested we need about 300 million miles to have statistical confidence. In the hundreds of millions of miles, the Waymo driver has traveled. It was involved in two fatal crashes, which it did not appear to cause.

Here are the details of this crashes. In one, a speeding human driver rear ended a line of vehicles at a stoplight. There's an empty waymo in the line of struck cars. In another crash, a waymo was yielding for a pedestrian. It was rear ended by a motorcycle.

The motorcycle driver was in struck by a second car. That's everything.

When Timothy B. Lee looks at the entire safety picture, the results we have so far from

this big experiment, waymo is conducting on American roads. What he sees is mainly promising.

“So far it's been better than even drivers, and so far I think the case for a lot of the”

victim to do the experiment is very strong. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't scrutinize this waymo experiment as it continues. I find myself paying a lot of attention to waymo crashes, which isn't hard, they make headlines. The most harrowing one recently was this January. A child near an elementary school in Santa Monica is struck by a waymo.

A child ran across the street from behind a double park car and a waymo hit the kid. Santa Monica, please say the child's, a 10-year-old girl was not hurt. The company issued a statement. Waymo said its driver had breaked hard, reducing speed from 17 to under six miles per hour.

A faster reaction they claimed than a human driver would have been capable of. What happened next at the accident scene, actually answered your question I'd had? What does a waymo do after a car crash, since there's no human driver to help? Waymo employees what they call human fleet response agents, human beings who can't remotely drive the cars, but who the car can ask questions to if it gets confused.

In Santa Monica, the waymo called one of those humans. The human called 911, and this is the strangest part of waymo statement, apparently the car then waited at the scene of the accident until the police dismissed it.

“That's what we know so far, but there's two federal agencies investigating this crash,”

and so we'll have a full report in the future. One problem that's not really captured in the safety data that I've seen is what I'd call troubling edge cases. You see them in videos on social media, a waymo gets stuck at a dead stoplight, or blocks and emergency vehicle, or an example Timothy gave waymo's redriving past stop school buses

in Austin. I think it's reasonable to say this is like a clear cut rule that the vehicle should should fall this rule.

These edge cases are still very rare, and so if it's a one in 10 million thing, I think

it's not that big a deal as long as they are making progress, which for most of these I think they are. Timothy pointed to one area where waymo's not been as transparent as he'd like. Those human response agents, some of which are based here, some of the Philippines, there's questions about what specifically they do, and about how this will all work as waymo scales

up. We ask waymo for comment on everything you heard in this episode, especially the recent safety incidents. As spokesperson said that the data to date indicates that the waymo driver is already making road safer in the places where they operate, and says that waymo can use to work

with policy makers and regulators to improve its technology. That's the safety picture so far, which to me, after many months of looking at this, and talking to experts, looks pretty good. As waymo continues its rollout, other companies are quickly following behind. Amazon's new driverless taxi is launching in Las Vegas this summer, and it's expected

to arrive announced. There's other roadbo-taxing companies like Amazon Zeus, Uber is back in the mix, not making technology, but partnering with these roadbo-taxing companies. We ride recently struck a partnership with Uber to bring its 80s to Abu Dhabi, another assignment.

And many of those early waymo engineers are now CEOs of autonomous companies themselves. Dimitri Dogop is actually co-CE out waymo, but other team members run driverless trucking companies. That Don Burnett found her in CEO of Kodiak AI. Don, thank you so much for joining us.

It's good to see you again. Don Burnett is head of Kodiak AI, which has its technology deployed in driverless truck trucks in the Permian Basin. Please welcome CEO of Aurora Chris Irmzen, a big ride of applause. Chris Irmzen now heads Aurora, which currently has semi-trucks on Texas highways.

And my personal favorite plot development, which just emerged this week. I just broke on the information that Uber Fowder Travis Collinick is starting a new self-driving car company, with financial backing from Uber, and in partnership with Anthony Levandowski. Now for those who've been--

on their fourth.

“The big picture though, is that everywhere in America today that you see a driver, taxi,”

truck, food delivery, there are several companies working on the robot version, trying their best to make driver as a job, start to go the way of the knockerupper, of the rampwriter, those knockerupper by the way, they disappeared quietly, the lampletters did not. Writer Carl Benedict Frey tells the story of the lampletters union, how their strikes pondered New York City briefly into darkness, to the delight of lovers and thieves.

In Verivier Belgium, the lampletters' strikes turned violent, ending in an attack on the local police headquarters. The army was brought in. The lampletters lost their fight, in part just because they were so outnumbered.

“But the drivers today, fighting to save their livelihoods, are a significantly bigger”

force. We stand up, everybody that's right, share, union members or someone who drives the vehicle. Stand up.

4.8 million Americans try for living.

It's one of the most common jobs we have, and these workers do not plan to surrender to the California Tech companies. They're doing this because they stand to make an unfathomable amount of money if they eliminate driving jobs for working class people. I understand if it's a business, if it's capitalism, but not in my city, at the expense

of our jobs. These drivers are represented by unions backed by politicians, and in cities across America, blue cities. They're organizing. So far, they're winning.

Humans drive the city, law machines, labor drives the city, keep the work as in the workforce. If it works in another city, great, have fun, not here, not Boston. Thank you very much. Next week, the fight to save a job, to save the human driver. Don't miss this one.

Thank you for listening to our episode. I just want to say, making deeply reported stories like this one is only possible because far listeners, particularly our premium subscribers who pay to support the show. We are releasing our full interview with Sebastian Thran, who used to leave Google.

“Alex, their secret special projects lab, totally fascinating conversation with the kind of”

person who lives in the future and has a million strange ideas about it.

We are releasing that for our incognito mode members only, and it'll be in your feed. If you would like to know the future, sign up at search engine.show, and again, your membership specifically enables projects like this one. So thank you. Search engine is a presentation of audacity.

It is created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy, Pinnominating. Geart Graham is our senior producer, Emily Maltaera is our associate producer. Team Original Composition and Mixing by Armand Vizarian. Our production in turn is Piper Dumont. This episode is fact-checked by Mary Mathis.

Our executive producer is Leah Rees Dennis, thanks to the rest of the team and audacity. Rob Morandi, Kai Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Mark Huron, just interferenceist, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaff. Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next week with the second part of this story.

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