We're Learning to Live with Waymos. It's Going Weird

Molly Fischer reports on the way driverless cars make artificial intelligence's effects on agency, responsibility and public space physically visible. Waymo can provide safety and accessibility while transferring control from riders, workers and municipalities to a private system whose decisions and failures can be difficult to interpret.

The article reports more than 4,000 Waymo vehicles across fifteen U.S. cities and cites the company's claim of a 92 percent reduction in crashes causing serious injury or worse. It also documents vehicles entering roadwork or floodwater, illegal school-bus passes, fleet stalls during a power outage and neighborhood disputes over charging stations, while tracing the continuing dependence on maintenance and remote-assistance workers. The piece is reported cultural analysis rather than an independent safety audit, and its evidence is weighted toward San Francisco and selected incidents.