In 1951 the great science-fiction author Ray Bradbury published a short story called “The Pedestrian”. It told of a robotic police car roaming a future city looking for so-called “unusual” behaviors — in this case walking alone at night. And a pedestrian in the story was arrested by the car and driven off to be incarcerated.
There are many real world questions about robotic vehicles — like Waymo robotaxis — and how they’ll interact with our laws and privacy rights and other aspects of society. There were new Waymo problems again in San Francisco a week or so ago on July 4th, with their apparently being unable to deal with the celebrations causing another case there of Waymo triggered traffic gridlocks reportedly involving at least dozens of the vehicles, Waymos reportedly running out of power, reports of people being terrified when they saw a Waymo driving right over fireworks that had just been lit — yeah, kinda scary stuff.
Most human drivers would know how to handle these situations but robotaxis don’t have common sense — in fact Waymos were just recalled due to an unfortunate tendency to drive into flooded areas, and first responders continue to be angry about robotaxis interfering with emergency operations.
Now we have an event in San Mateo in the San Francisco Bay Area that invokes Bradbury’s story and other predicted robocar scenarios. In this case we have a couple of teenagers who were indeed misbehaving in a Waymo. Reports are that they were drinking, but obviously they weren’t driving since they were in a Waymo — and were shooting Orbeez — squishy soft gel water beads — from a toy gun out a window. Some of the details of this are still vague. But the bottom line is that the Waymo diverted from the teens’ ordered trip, took the teens to a parking lot, stopped there, and called the police.
Apparently the police showed up in force, perhaps because Waymo didn’t understand it was a toy gun involved, so it’s lucky nobody was injured in that kind of police response situation. Early reports were that Waymo locked the teens in the vehicle, which of course would have all sorts of safety implications among other issues, but later reports suggest that the doors were unlocked but Waymo lied to the teens and falsely told them that there were maintenance issues to get them to stay with the vehicle — meanwhile Waymo was actually getting the police involved.
Many of the stories about this seem to be taking a kind of chuckling tone and saying gee wasn’t this cool? And in this particular case nothing obviously serious ultimately seems to have happened, at the time of the last report I saw the teens hadn’t even been actually arrested or charged with any crimes. But a broader look at this sequence of events and the situation in general seems much less clear. One way to look at it is asking how a human taxi driver might have reacted to the same set of circumstances. Probably they would have told the teens to “knock it off” and if they continued to misbehave kick them out of the cab. And probably they wouldn’t have lied to kids about a false taxi breakdown, secretly call the police, and sit in a parking lot with them for the police to arrive.
But obviously robot vehicles, even when under remote control from humans at a central facility, have a limited set of options since there’s no human driver physically present. Some observers of this event have suggested that what Waymo did — given that they’re not an agent of the government — could be technically categorized as kidnapping, even if it’s viewed as a safety-positive action in this case. And in fact the formal definition of kidnapping includes taking someone where they didn’t ask to be, by use of deception. Whether that word is used isn’t very important for now. And really we can put aside for today the details of the teens’ Waymo adventure.
But there’s a whole long list of questions that have been percolating in the background about robotaxis that are now pushed to the front of the stage. These vehicles have cameras and microphones everywhere. What kind of passenger activities inside would trigger the firms diverting passengers to other locations against their will or surveillance reports being filed? Could this capability be abused by future authorities, or by hackers, perhaps on a mass scale by technologically sophisticated terrorists? And that’s just to start. These may sound like sci-fi concepts but the reality of robotaxis is already here and as a society we seem to be virtually unprepared for its implications.
In Bradbury’s story, there was only one police robocar for an entire city. But Waymo reportedly has something close to a 1000 robotaxis in San Francisco alone, and many more in other cities in their rapidly growing robotaxi fleets. Other firms are building their own robotaxi fleets as well. How these vehicles are going to interact with government authorities, and society more broadly, is far too important to be left to the tender mercies of the Big Tech Billionaires in their never ending search to maximize their profits.
So it’s up to us to make sure that these firms act appropriately in society’s best interests and don’t drive society, and all of us, right off a technological cliff.
–Lauren–