Roundup: The return of self-driving hype

Everywhere you look, the self-driving hype seems to be back — we just now often use the term “robotaxis.” I have no doubt the technology has improved over the past decade, but the notion that self-driving cars are on the cusp of replacing a significant percentage of road trips — or that they would have an unquestionably positive impact if they did — is pure fantasy.

Over in Dezeen, I wrote a piece about the revival in the hype around autonomous vehicles, and how it’s unquestionably linked to the general hype around AI we’ve been living with for the past two years. About a decade ago, we were living through the same thing — the assertion robots and AI were going to take a ton of jobs, with self-driving cars at the heart of the argument.

That didn’t actually happen, but it distracted us from rational conversations about transport policy for years — and got in the way of actually addressing road deaths, traffic congestion, and other very real problems people have with the transport system as it’s currently arranged. Sadly, a bit of new tech isn’t going to solve those things.

Find an excerpt below, and head over to Dezeen to read the whole thing.

A little over 10 years ago, Google co-founder Sergey Brin took the stage at the Code Conference to make a big announcement: Google was making a self-driving car. The small white pod had two seats, lacked a steering wheel or pedals, and Brin claimed it was the future of mobility. Tech journalist Kara Swisher declared it was "delightful" and "conceptually where things are going".

If you were reading coverage of tech and transportation back in those days, excitement about the future that autonomous vehicles were supposed to be ushering in was everywhere. Automakers like Tesla and General Motors, along with tech companies like Google and Uber, were investing in efforts to accelerate the technology.

Those companies were pushing a narrative that computer-driven cars would start taking over in the matter of a few years and since computers were so much better than humans – or so they claimed – they'd also solve traffic, road deaths, transport inequity, and so many of the other problems facing cities.

But as the years passed, all those benefits failed to materialise. Musk kept pushing back his timelines, such that self-driving mastery always seemed two years away, and Google cancelled its self-driving pod in 2017.

When an autonomous vehicle operated by Uber killed a pedestrian in Arizona in March 2018, the hype around the technology finally suffered a fatal blow. Self-driving ambitions were reined in, Uber sold off its division completely a few years later, and the notion that autonomous cars were going to usher in a transport utopia receded. But the damage had been done.

This week in the roundup, find some recommended reads about the plan to get Google to sell off Chrome, why AI won’t save endangered languages, and how Republicans were ready to rid themselves of Elon Musk — until Trump won. No labor updates this week, but find plenty of other news you might have missed from the past week.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I had a fascinating conversation with Becca Lewis about the conservative movement that shaped internet policy in the 1990s, but which has largely been forgotten in our current discourse around that period of time. Remembering it helps show new technology isn’t always as linked to progress as boosters would like us to believe.

I was also featured in a new video about Elon Musk and the history of Silicon Valley on the Second Thought YouTube channel. Check it out below!

Have a great week!

— Paris