There Will Always Be A Place For Human Drivers

New York City is getting Waymo test cars, the first step towards fully autonomous rideshares in the Big Apple. As a resident of the greatest city in the word myself, though, I have no interest in ever taking an autonomous cab — in fact, I’m firmly opposed to the idea, but not out of fear of the car’s driving. No, I won’t take an autonomous cab for a different reason: I will always, no matter how good self-driving gets, want a human in the car. I need someone to chat with. 

More than that, I need a car that is firmly someone else’s. Their music, their window locks, their control of the air conditioning. I’m so sick of technology that caters experiences to me and my tastes, that cordons me off in my own little frictionless world. I want to engage in the reality we all share, and an autonomous cab will never do that — but a human driver always will. 

I never wear headphones on transit. On the subway or the bus, it’s mostly because I know I’ll miss my stop if I’m too distracted, but in a taxi or rideshare I keep my ears clear out of respect for the driver. I’m in their car, after all, and I’ve had plenty of great conversations with drivers — I don’t want to cut that option off, treat the person driving me around like I’m somehow better than them and above engaging with their world. Most of my Shazam history is music from rideshare drivers, and I’m always glad to be introduced to new things — music, radio stations, perspectives on the world — that I didn’t know about before I got in that car. 

In our modern world of algorithmic curation, where everything is served to us on a platter based on what we’ve liked in the past, it’s easy to end up with singular interests and perspectives. You listen to the same playlists over and over, or the occasional new track that would fit right in with those others you’ve had since college. You see the same jokes, the same types of people on your TikTok or Instagram feeds. You get shuffled off into a little side world, something wholly disconnected from the enormity of human experience. I, for one, am sick of it. 

I do not want to live in a perfect frictionless world where everything is catered to me. I don’t even have a music streaming service any more — instead I’m sending my $10 every month to KEXP, where real human DJs play music that I may not like. The flip side, though, is that I may run into music I didn’t know I’d like, and that no algorithm would’ve fed me. There’s so much more to the human experience than our little catered lives would have us believe, we just need to put up with a little bit of friction to find it. Kurt Vonnegut understood this:

I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “OK, I’ll send you the pages.”

Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, “Where are you going?” I say, “Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something.

Conservatives are terrified of New York City’s subway system for this very reason: It brings together nearly everyone in the city (save for Staten Island) as peers, sharing space. It forces you to interact with people you wouldn’t otherwise know, to acknowledge their humanity in a way that’s anathema to the project of fear and dehumanization. The subway pierces the pristine, carefully-assembled bubbles that people live in, and forces us to recognize that we’re all the same sort of dancing animal — no matter how much algorithms and cable news try to tell us otherwise. I’ll take the subway over an autonomous taxi any day. 

Of course, there’s also the economic side of autonomous cabs. Nearly 200,000 of New York City’s own dancing animals relied on the income from driving a taxi or rideshare car in 2023, and autonomy cuts them out of the equation. It’s a luddite view in the original, historical sense, back when weavers were destroying automated machines that performed their work with lower quality for less money. The cash you spend on a taxi goes in some part to its driver, while the money you tap-to-pay on a Waymo goes off to Silicon Valley.

A little bit of friction, a bit of exposure to aspects of the world you can’t control, is a good thing. It grants us perspective, a view of humanity, and a chance to find things we’ll come to love — things no algorithm would ever have given us. To cede your life to algorithms and rigorous personalized control is to slip further into your own little bubble, and separate yourself further from the world we’re all meant to share. 

I will always take the human driver over the robot, because I want to hear how the human driver’s day has been. I want to hear the playlist full of Spanish-language club bangers, or the local radio station with its weirdly fetish-themed ads for personal injury attorneys. A robotaxi will let me set my own air conditioning, raise and lower my own windows, play my own playlists, and spend some further amount of my day in the complete and total isolation enabled by technology. Hell with that, I say. I expect a little chitchat.