Close All Tabs - Waymo Problems

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Self-driving Waymo robotaxis have become a familiar sight in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, but not everyone is happy about that. These “ghost-like” autonomous vehicles have made a lot of people uneasy, some even going as far as to vandalize the cars. But what’s behind this hostility? In this episode, Morgan speaks with Bloomberg journalist Ellen Huet and robot law professor Ryan Calo to explore the rise of Waymo vandalism and its roots in our collective anxiety over artificial intelligence.  Guests: Ellen Huet, Features writer at Bloomberg News Ryan Calo, Professor of Law at University of Washington Further reading: Waymo’s Expansion Provokes Anxieties of AI Takeover – Ellen Huet, Bloomberg The next big robotaxi push is almost here — Harri Weber, Quartz  The Courts Can Handle the Deadly Uber Self-Driving Car Crash. But that doesn’t mean the law is ready for autonomous vehicles. — Ryan Calo, Slate Good Robot, Bad Robot: Dark and Creepy Sides of Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, and AI — Jo Ann Oravec, Professor at the University of Wisconsin Read the transcript here. Want to give us feedback on the series? Shoot us an email at [e-mail] You can also follow us on Instagram Credits: This episode was reported and hosted by Morgan Sung. It was produced and sound designed by Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Jen Chien. Original music by Chris Egusa, with additional music from APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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From KQED. Do we look like influencers right now? Is this embarrassing to be walking up to a Waymo. This is me and my friend Harry Weber booking my first ride in a Waymo. It's a self-driving car service. Some people also call them Robo taxis. Wait, I think I have to unlock it. Oh, up, there we go. Okay. From Morgan? No one's going to respond. Waymos are, again, totally self-driving. There's no human in the front seat. Hello, from Waymo. As we get going, just give us one minute to cover a few times. I invited Harry because she's also a tech journalist and she covers the future of cars. She recently wrote about the expansion of robotoxies for courts. And also, we both had a craving for deli sandwiches from this one spot with terrible street parking. So why not take away,

Mo? There's no one behind the wheel. Is there a real need for the steering wheel? Literally, I don't see any purpose for it, but for whatever reason, there's, you know, national laws require this steering wheel to still be there. It's a little ghostly though, right? It's nudging us around, keeping us in the lane. Waymo's are something of a tourist attraction in California. My cousins always want to take one whenever they come to visit me. But honestly, ever since Waymo's launched a few months ago in Los Angeles, where Harry and I live,

I've been pretty hesitant to take them. Part of it is, yeah, I don't really trust a robot to drive me around, especially not through a very busy intersection in Korea town during rush hour. But that's where this car picked us up. These things aren't perfect. Something could go wrong while we're driving or while it's moving us around. But Waymo's claim, based on its own data, is that it is a lot safer than a human driver. I think that you're probably more likely to find that they're a nuisance than they are dangerous.

But despite their great track record when it comes to safety, I feel like Waymo mishaps are always going viral. Like a couple of weeks ago, there is a video of a Waymo in San Francisco, ignoring a public works crew, and driving straight through a sinkhole. And then there was a video of a guy in Arizona who called a Waymo to take him to the airport,

but got stuck in a parking lot. I'm in a Waymo car. This car is just going in circles. I got my seatbelt on. I can't get out the car. Has this been hacked? What's going on? I feel like I'm in the movies.

Waymos make me feel a little uneasy, but it's really other people's reactions to Waymos that makes me nervous about being in one. Even getting in in front of that coffee shop, do you feel self-conscious? Yeah, yeah. It felt a little uncool. I felt so deeply uncool getting in.

I think something flipped when Google was first developing a driverless car. I think there was actually like a cool factor going, Or maybe I was just that uncool that I thought it was cool. But tech criticism has evolved a lot since then. And so now we're in this car, and it does feel a little bit like we are maybe class traitors. And it's not just the uncool factor. Public reaction to Waymo's has turned violent. Like this incident in San Francisco, where a bunch of guys started spray painting a Waymo while a group of women was

inside. Why are you attacking you guys? Connected to rider's support. Call may be recorded for following the sheds. Oh my God. Holy shit. There is also a recent viral video of people swarming a Waymo in Los Angeles. One of the guys in the video so gracefully leaps into the air and drop kicks the passenger door

right off the hinges, while another person beats the Waymo's windshield with a ripped off piece of its own front bumper. To be clear, it doesn't seem to be. like any living person has been hurt in any of these incidents, unless you count getting a little car sick. Yeah, I got a flight to catch. Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy. But to a lot of people, including myself, I'll be honest, something about seeing robots do a human task just does not feel right. And clearly, it triggers some deep-seated instinct to attack. So what is behind this recent outburst of aggression against Waymos? Is it just that destroying them

makes really good content that's bound to go viral? Or is it our collective anxiety over the state of tech right now? This is close all tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. People are justifiably jaded against Silicon Valley, and the idea of a robot takeover would make anyone nervous. But why take it out on Waymo? All right, we're going to kick this off like we usually do. A new tab.

Waymo, vandalism. We're going to talk to Ellen Hewitt. She covers technology and Silicon Valley and startup culture for Bloomberg, or, as she puts it, all things at the intersection of tech and humans. And she wrote about how Waymo's recent expansion provoked so close. called AI anxiety. As long as these cars have been around in their various iterations, so probably over the last decade or so, people have reacted to them with suspicion and at times with violence. Like even back in 2018 when early Waymo vehicles were being tested in Arizona, people threw

rocks at them, people like attacked the cars. You know, even if these cases are rare, it has been somewhat consistent that people react to robot cars at times with anger or violence or or like attempting to kind of outsmart them. You know, there are early stories of people who figured out that you could confuse autonomous cars by putting a traffic cone on the hood of the car. I've seen that. Yeah, and like there's clearly some human impulse to try to almost like assert agency or control over this vehicle that, you know, in some existential sense, is kind of a threat.

I have to wonder how much product designed plays a role in ensuring that people are more receptive to these cars. I mean, I'm thinking of, you know, that 2000s movie Herbie Fully Loaded, how it's like a cutesy little buggy. And if I saw that driving around, I wouldn't want to like beat that up. But when I see like a cyber truck, I'm like, oh, fight or flight activated. I guarantee lots of designers have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about this question. I remember, it must have been a decade ago, you know, I was a tech reporter. I was working at Forbes and I was invited to take a test drive in an early autonomous car. And what I remember most is that those early cars were designed to look so cute.

Like it was like a little gumdrop shaped car and it was white and like its headlights were kind of that like oval shape to make it look like, you know, like these cute little cartoon eyes. Exactly. And yeah, I guarantee that designers and engineers. spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this threatening-ish technology seem as cute and approachable as possible. But yeah, Waymo's are obviously like kind of just like a normal looking car. My guess is it's not coincidence that they're all white. Maybe people associate that with like sort of angelic energy or something. But let's talk about what's at the root of this feeling that a lot of people have when confronted with a robot doing a human job. That is a new tab.

Ready? and AI anxiety. Okay, so a lot of this anger against Waymo's is due to the very real risk of job loss as robotaxies begin replacing human drivers. But it's also bigger than that. AI is moving into a lot of areas besides cars. In her story about the spike in Waymo vandalism, Ellen cited University of Wisconsin professor Joanne Oribic, who said that a lot of people are just not really comfortable with a realization that something else is intelligent. I think people sometimes direct their general anxiety about like job displacement from AI toward Waymo's just because these are objects that exist in the physical world and that you can actually smash the windshield of Waymo car in the way that you can't quite attack ChatGPT, right?

Like I think in some sense they're at a disadvantage by simply being like a physical object and something that you are reminded of every time, you know, one drives by. And the cars have also done things that are genuinely annoying. Like in San Francisco, there was this cluster of Waymo cars that had gotten trapped in a honking war with each other. So they were like up at the middle of the night, you know, it's like 4.30 in the morning. And neighbors who were trying to sleep near wherever these cars are gathered were being woken up at night by the sound of all of these cars honking at each other. And like in the most nonsensical way. The term AI can mean a lot of different things. Autonomous vehicles like Waymo do use artificial intelligence.

They use cameras to see, they're trained to recognize objects and calculate the distance between them. But it's pretty different from how a generative AI tool like Chat ChbT works, or how other AI generators work to produce images, videos, and music. But to a lot of people, the anxiety is the same. I think what makes people have this reaction, regardless of what type of AI it is, is that these products are being designed to do actions and take on jobs and responsibilities that used to be solely the jurisdiction of humans, right? So it used to be like only people could see and drive and manipulate a car. And now we can see that a human is not needed to do that. And it used to be that a human was needed to provide half of a conversation.

You couldn't have that, you know, without another person on the other side of the line. Now that's no longer true. So I think what we're seeing is even though the technology is different, in some cases and in some ways the human reaction to it is the same because I think it's provoking the same question of, well, where do I belong in this world where this thing that I used to do can be done by a non-human entity. Yeah. There's a Waymo ad. Well, it's finally happening. Robots.

They're coming. Hi, Avery. Hmm, maybe that's a good thing. And, like, Waymo's clearly playing into people's concerns about the robots, but putting, like, this positive spin on it. What do you think? I mean, an ad like that makes me laugh because I just imagine, I wish I could be a fly on the wall in the marketing discussions that led to that copy. Because I'm sure they were like, guys, we have to address the fact that, like, some people are scared of this. but like, let's make it cheeky, like, let's make it funny.

You know, there are researchers out there who study human-robot relations, and some of the things that they explained to me were, like, these human-like objects that can move with some intelligence in our world feel existentially unsettling to us because we don't know where we fall in the pecking order anymore. And don't forget, we've been consuming so much sci-fi about how super-advanced robots can totally disrupt our way of life.

Robots don't feel fear. They don't feel anything. They don't get hungry. They don't sleep. I do. Megan, turn off. Are you sure? Open the pod bay doors, hell.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. This pop culture fear of artificial intelligence and robots taking over has been around for a while. But it hasn't been limited to the screen. Physical attacks on robots have been happening for over a decade. A classic example is the story of hitchbot.

And the story of hitchbot starts back in 2013 when a group of researchers decided they wanted to try to answer the question, can robots trust humans? Hitchbought will be depending on the kindness and the curiosity of strangers. So Hitchbott was this little humanoid robot that couldn't really do much, but it was on a mission to hitchhike across Canada. It had a stocky, cylindrical body and goofy arms and legs made out of pool noodles. Its head had an LED panel with a little smiley face. Hitchbot couldn't move on its own. It could only recognize human speech and engage in basic conversations, mostly to ask bystanders for help.

It also had a GPS and took pictures of its surroundings every 20 minutes so that researchers could keep tabs on it. I mean, it was pretty adorable. And on its first few journeys, everything went fine. People really got excited about this idea and wanted to contribute to helping the robot get from point A to point B. So Hitchbought traveled across Canada and traveled around Europe. And then in 2015, Hitchbott tried to do a cross-country trip across the United States and started in Boston. But Hichbott only made it to Philadelphia, where it was tragically attacked and decapitated.

This is the bunch Hitchbott was killed on. Oh, really? You know the story of Hitchbott? Yeah, yeah. It made it around the world and it died in Philadelphia. It didn't make it around the world because it died just in Philadelphia. Maybe they wanted to reassert their power or dominance over a human-like object and feel secure in their place as humans. But, yeah, I think the story of Hitchbott tells us a lot about the psychology of humans versus robots.

Right, and that Waymos may not be ready for Philly yet. Seems possible. Okay. Clearly, there's something here about robots that makes us uncomfortable. People don't always respond well to things that look a little too human or act kind of human, but aren't quite human. So, aside from making the cars cuter in hopes that people won't attack them, is there anything else Waymo can do? When I scroll past one of these videos of someone's spray painting one of the car, Why are you attacking you guys?

Connected to the rider's support. Or blocking its way. Get out of the way. Move! Or worst case scenario, harassing someone inside, which did happen in San Francisco. With these videos, I've always wondered, why can't the car just back up and drive away? Any human driver would? We'll get into that and some other very thorny questions after this break.

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Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. As this technology progresses, what are the implications of robots making their own decisions in these very high-stakes situations? But that is a new tab. The Ethics of Self-Driving Cars. To dig into this, I called up Ryan Kalo. He's a legal scholar and a professor at the University of Washington School of Law.

And his specialty? Robot Law. So he had his own theory about what makes Waymo's so attractive to vandalize. It's the fact that they're doing something transgressive, where they're, you know, they are, of course, vandalizing like an entity, an agent. but it very much falls short of doing violence to a human being. Obviously, these same people wouldn't run up to a human being or a human cab driver and spray paint them. But the point of the matter is that, you know, there is this unease about these technologies,

has to do with their novelty, has to do with their being too close to being these anthropomorphic agents. By anthropomorphic, Ryan means having human-like characteristics, even if it isn't actually human. Yeah, I live in L.A., which has horrendous traffic, and so I watch Oamow, try to make a U-turn, and get cut off at every possible opportunity, and I feel bad for it. What's going on with that?

It's hard not to empathize, right? Yeah. The fact is that human beings are quite bad at categorizing robots as either things or people. And the more anthropomorphic technology is, the harder that is. So what's really interesting about Waymo is apparently it's associated as much with being a car as it is with being an entity. Interesting. I always thought that if the vandalism were occurring inside the car, right? So sometimes people vandalize the interior of a Waymo because

they're just there by themselves seemingly, right? And there's one thing to put a camera there, but if you were to put like an anthropomorphic robot driver in the Waymo that look back at you when you get in to say, hey, where can I take you? And also it was visible. Like when you saw the Waymo trying to make a U-turn, you saw a person in there. It's struggling. Yeah. It's struggling. Or when somebody went to vandalize this thing, cause it to crash, you know, cause it to shut down, like vandalize it. And there's this android in there looking at you. That looks like a person. I think the outcome would be different. Ryan's theory is that because Waymo's don't resemble any living thing, it's easier to justify being violent. And sure, passengers would probably be creeped out by a robot doll in the driver's seat. But maybe people would be discouraged from attacking it because there's another human-ish thing there.

There's this concept called the Uncanny Valley. The deal is it's a valley is that appreciation of the robot goes up and up and up and up and up and up, the more anthropomorphic it becomes. But then suddenly, when it gets super close to actually like a human, it precipitously drops before coming back if it's completely like a human, right? That's the vow. Now, Waymo cars, they do not look like people, right? So they really are very far down on that curve. They're more thrilling to vandalize than a mailbox. I just don't see it happening with something that felt more like a person.

Yeah. You have written about the legal quandaries of self-driving cars. And when they first started hitting the road about five or so years ago, people were mostly worried about passenger safety and crashes. And it seems like companies like Waymo were maybe not so prepared for, like, the irate protesters. If you want to talk specifically about vandalism, this has messed up people working in AI and robotics for like a long time.

And so it shouldn't really have surprised Waymo. I don't know how one guards against it, right? Think about, Morgan, do you recall the time when Microsoft released that chatbot called Tay? Oh, my God. Yeah. Microsoft, you know, trains this chatbot early. This is pre-open AI and so on.

And they released this Twitter-based chat bot that's supposed to learn how to interact. And within an hour, there are these people trolls on the internet, getting it to say all kinds of racist and terrible things. And I end up having to take the chat bot down when the company was asked about, like, why did this happen? They're like, well, we just didn't anticipate that folks would do this, right? Unfortunately. The truth is about technology, especially like new emerging technology. You just don't know how it's going to play out in society. In fact, this leads some law professors like myself to conclude that technology is a particularly difficult thing to regulate because you don't know how it's going to play out in advance.

Back in 2018, Ryan wrote an essay in Slate about whether the law was ready for self-driving cars. And in it, he refutes a common critique of this technology that has to do with the old philosophical dilemma, known as the trolley problem. The trolley problem is this thought experiment about making decisions. You've got a train, chugging along a track, and it's heading toward five people. But you, the decision maker, can flip a switch and direct the train to another track. Here's a twist. There's another single person stuck to that other track. So do you flip the switch?

Save five people, but by making that decision, kill another? This is the kind of thought experiment people love to refer to when puzzling over the morality of autonomous vehicles and other forms of AI. It's the assumption that self-driving cars will have to make the same kinds of moral decisions. But Ryan says the engineers of these vehicles, and we, as a public, should worry less about these philosophical hypotheticals and more about the practical, real-life situations that these cars might face. programming a moral compass is still up for debate, but programming object recognition is way more realistic. Just imagine that a driverless car is always going to be better than a person at avoiding a stroller in a parking lot.

You know, always better because it's better sensors, better response times, you know, whatever. And the driverless car is also always going to be better than a human being in avoiding a shopping cart, okay? But what happens if a driverless car encounters a shopping cart and a stroller at the same time? Imagine that the car, confused about what to do and not able to differentiate between these two objects, ends up making a wrong decision. Well, the headline reads, robot car kills baby to save groceries, okay? That's the end of driverless cars in America, if that happens.

right? So the thing that's fascinating with driverless car liability is it actually really matters the fact that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't, even if they mess up us overall. So, Ryan, as an expert in robot law, do you think driverless cars will have rights at some point the way that humans do when they get into an accident? What I will say is that we're very far from a situation where AI or robots will be able to claim rights the way that people have them. And even though some doomsayers claim that AI is going to wake up and kill everybody, you know, like the first time I see a presentation where like PowerPoint works perfectly,

that will be when I worry about, you know what I mean? Like, AV before AI. Like we're just very far away from getting to that level of sophistication. Yeah, but one day maybe. And at that time, we're really going to have to have an overhaul. a sea change in the law because suddenly there will be an entity that has rights and responsibilities, but is not like us. The robot takeover is not going to happen anytime soon.

But the friction between humans and these non-human counterparts, that's only going to increase as AI creeps more and more into our lives. I'm going to be honest, I thought that ride I took with my friend Harry was actually really nice. It was a nice temperature in there, the AC was going, there were lo-fi beats playing at such a reasonable volume. It didn't smell weird. There's part of me that's a little disappointed because, you know, I'm a little bit of a hater. And so I want to drive through cement. I want that same.

I want to be the one who gets to, gets to like roll their eyes at these things that are sort of just inexplicably irksome. Are you getting whamopilled? We're getting waymo pills. Oh, God. I just don't, I don't want to. You give in. Pull the handle twice to exit. The first pull unlocks.

The second opens the door. Okay, we're pulling up to the curb now. There's an older man at the crosswalk kind of just glaring this way to go down. And I feel really weird. The deep shame. The shame. I have to admit, it would have been great content if something wild did happen during my first Waymo ride. But like the majority of rides, it was pretty uneventful.

It almost felt normal. And maybe that's the real robot takeover. It's the gradual. boring replacement of our everyday human interactions. For now, let's close all these tabs. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan's son. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Aguza is our senior editor. Jen Cheehan is KQED's director of podcasts and helps edit the show.

Sound designed by Maya Cueva, original music by Chris Agusa with additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. audience engagement support from Mahas Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager, and Holly Kernan is our chief content officer. Support for this program comes from B-Rong-Hoo and supporters of the KQUED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard

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