Self Driving Car Expert: These Are The Only Driving Jobs That Will Remain In 2030! Dr. Jack Stilgoe

By 2035, every driving job in the UK

gone. Delivery drivers, taxi drivers, careers. How realistic is that scenario?

So I would say Dr. Jack Stillgo.

Dr. Jack Stillgo is a professor in science and technology studies at University College London

where he researches the governance of emerging technologies.

You've warned that automation is arriving faster than people realise and that the UK isn't ready

for what happens when machines start taking the wheel.

You know, when it comes to artificial intelligence, a lot is happening in a lot of areas very quickly.

Automation and self-driving vehicles could trigger the collapse of one of the biggest industries

in the UK. Autopilot does go wrong. The first person to die in a Tesla autopilot crash

was a real Tesla enthusiast. When something goes wrong, who's responsible? Is it the driver,

the developer or no one? So you mentioned that you could take your hands off the steering wheel

on a motorway if you own a Tesla. Please don't do that because...

Dr. Jack Stillgo, your work on how society governs technology puts you right at the intersection

of innovation and consequence, asking not can we build it but should we be doing this?

You've warned that automation is arriving faster than people realise and that the UK

isn't ready for what happens when machines start taking the wheel.

But in your own words, who are you and what do you do?

Thanks very much for the introduction, Ben. I'm a professor of science technology policy.

I work at University College London. The day job, I teach students who come to our department,

come to our degree programme with interests in how science and technology is changing the world.

So I work in a university but I spend quite a lot of my time working with various bits of

the British government because I want to help them understand how you come up with good policies

in this area. As we all know, when it comes to artificial intelligence, a lot is happening in

a lot of areas very quickly and there's a sense sometimes that we're sort of suffering from a

sort of whiplash and what do you do about that is not just a question for the scientists and the

engineers, it's a question for society. So let's imagine a headline for a second.

By 2035, every driving job in the UK gone, delivery drivers, taxi drivers, couriers gone,

replaced by fleets of self-driving vehicles that never get tired, never take breaks and never

make mistakes or so be it we think. So it's just a theory. How realistic is that scenario in that

headline? So I would say 2035, never going to happen, right? I mean it's just one of the things

that I'm interested in is asking what it would actually take for scenarios like that to happen.

So if you are a technological enthusiast, you might be a startup guy running a self-driving car

company or you're fixated on artificial intelligence, right? There's a lot of hype there and a lot of

money behind that hype that says everything is going to change instantly. Something like cars

though, streets. Streets are really, really complicated things. The world does not change

that quickly from one form of technology to another form of technology, which means that

we are likely to have a mix of things on our roads and this isn't just in Britain, this is going to

be everywhere in the world, a mix of things on our roads for the foreseeable future. I mean,

genuinely for hundreds of years. So there are changes that happen quickly in terms of the

ways that people get about and we can look back, say, 120 years to sort of American cities when

you saw big, quick transformations from trams and buses to the arrival of the motor car, right?

But you still had horses on the streets and one of the things here in London that you still

have on the streets in 2025 is horses, right? You don't just switch from one thing to another.

So anytime there's a new form of automation, it has to deal with the world as it is,

which means a really, really complex engineering problem.

See, I spend a lot of my time also in America, specifically in Los Angeles,

and I've been starting to use Waymo and a bunch of self-driving cars that are in LA and I remember

my first ever drive I took in a Waymo. I think everyone probably would because it was such a

unusual thing to be doing, so out of habit, so out of control. But after using it over and over

again, I actually prefer it to the other methods of getting around Los Angeles.

In the UK, we're not currently there in 2025 yet. We're at the point where we can take our hands

off the wheel on the motorway in something like a Tesla Model 3 and have a degree of self-driving

cars. But when do you think like the launch date, like what you were saying about horses kind of

are still here, but the car came about 120 years ago, when's the launch date of like

full auto-autonomous driving? So I think the boring answer to the when question

is that it's the wrong question, right? It's going to be a where question. So where will

self-driving cars appear? Where will they get used? Under what circumstances? There's a reason why,

and I want to ask you about this because I've actually never been in a Waymo without a driver,

and that's new to me. There's a reason why those things are in only some parts of America,

right? And there's a reason why we don't have Waymos in the centre of London without drivers.

We do have some forms of, we have some small self-driving car companies testing their technologies

here, and that's because places are really, really different, right? Just because your robots

learn to drive in Los Angeles doesn't mean it can drive in San Francisco, doesn't mean it can

drive in Phoenix. So Waymo has had to work out how to deal with all of those different cities,

which means that the when question, it sort of depends because the companies that want to

deliver these technologies, they will have particular ideas about whether they think

there's a market there, but also particular ideas about whether they think it's an easy thing to

automate. And as anybody that's been in Los Angeles knows, the streets are so different from

the streets in central London, so it's actually a really different engineering problem. Just because

you have, as it were, learnt to drive in the United States doesn't mean that you can then just pick

up your self-driving car, put it on a boat, take it to London, and then also consider

properly, properly mad driving around and take it to Naples, take it to Delhi, right? And that's a

completely different engineering challenge, plus those companies are going to think, well,

are we going to get the same sort of market in those places that we're going to get in Los

Angeles? Probably not. Knowing what you know about self-driving vehicles, would you have got in that

in LA? So yes, I would, because I know Waymo quite well, and I've been really impressed with how

they've developed their technology, and they've done it in quite a responsible way. To go back to

your Tesla example, though, I think Tesla is maybe a more real example. So you mentioned that you

could take your hands off the steering wheel on a British motorway if you own a Tesla, and I would

say please, please don't do that, because I think legally you're not allowed to, but also the Tesla

technology isn't nearly as good as Tesla say it is. So they've marketed the technology for more

than a decade as an autopilot, and more recently been calling it full self-driving, and it is not

a full self-driving technology, which means that it does go wrong, and when it does go wrong, we

don't know very much about why it's gone wrong, which means that if you are experimenting with this

stuff behind the wheel of your Tesla, you are taking your life into your hands. We haven't had any big

crashes as far as I know in this country, but in the United States, there have been, you know,

quite a few, more than a dozen serious incidents, deaths caused by people using that technology

in a way that is really, really dangerous. So if you'd asked me the question about the Tesla

RoboTaxi that's just being rolled out in, I think it's Austin in Texas, I might have had a different

answer. Waymo, I've been really impressed with because they've built a culture of engineering

carefully, developing the technology carefully on the whole, getting on quite well with the

governments of the places where they're operating. They seem pretty trustworthy.

So how then, if what you're saying and your viewpoint on autonomous driving in Teslas,

and the fact there was a word there like illegal for some of this, how then is it actually being

used in the UK? So I don't know the legal status of the full self, the most advanced form of the

Tesla technology. I know that there are a lot of Tesla users, Tesla customers using that technology

in the States and Tesla use their customers experiences as training data for their artificial

intelligence systems. And I know that one of the frustrations that Tesla have is that

their full most advanced technology is not fully legal in European markets or the UK,

which means that like a lot of this, we're in a sort of legal gray area. And it means that it

sort of falls on users to decide whether or not to do this stuff. And the bottom line is that as

the driver, you are still fully responsible all the time for what your car does, which means that

you need to really know the limits of the technology. And at the moment, it's really hard

to know the limits of the technology because we still don't know when these things fail. We've

had incidents in the United States, for example, of something that's called phantom braking,

because Tesla, as part of their AI technology, use cameras as their main sensor, which, you know,

they've got very good cameras and Tesla's argument is, well, we as human beings only have these

sensors, which are in effect cameras, and we can drive. So why not just just use that? But it means

that occasionally the technology gets fooled by things like shadows and so can slam on the brakes.

And there was an incident a couple of years ago in the United States where a Tesla slammed on

the brakes in a tunnel. And I think thankfully nobody died in that incident, but there was big

pile of cars behind it, right? Lots of cars slamming into the basket. It's funny, you say that my

Sprinter in the US has like an anti braking feature, obviously, where if it sees somebody

come out in front of you or he thinks you're distracted, it will just break for you. It's got

all the kind of systems that Merck's fit on it. I had a weird thing once where I was going under

a bridge with a massive shadow and it just locked on the brake in the middle of a freeway. So it

might not be a Tesla specific, but Tesla have obviously taken that technology to the next level.

And there's a quote, which I heard on another podcast, and I really do like it, which is,

some people want to go to Mars and others want to take over the universe.

And what it was referring to is the difference between Elon Musk and Sam Altman at Open AI.

Do you think Elon cares more with his philosophy of his businesses and the world and his holistic

approach and what he actually wants, which is to take humans to Mars than a lot of the recent

exploding of startups around AI and putting that technology into things like vehicles?

Or do you think it's dangerous? I mean, I have no idea. Trying to work out what Elon Musk actually

wants is really, really hard. It appears to change from time to time. It's not that we

shouldn't try to work out what drives these people and what drives these companies. And I have no

doubt that somebody like Elon Musk is honest about the potential that he sees for a technology

like a self-driving technology to improve people's lives in some ways. And we might

take issue with how fast he wants to go and what role he sees his company play relative to

governments. But I'm not sure I'm any better of a muscologist than anybody else.

I was in a Cybertruck about a year ago and we went from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon in this

Cybertruck and then we came back the following day. And we had a VA Corvette, was the car I'd

rented and my friends had rented a Cybertruck and went to do this video. And we drove back

in the Cybertruck in full autonomous driving mode. And it was actually insane when we got into

Vegas how one of the things that it does to kind of calm you down, that it knows what it's doing,

is giving you a big picture. So like on the screen, it picks out every individual people and

sort of shows you. And then you can kind of fact check what it sees. However, at the same time,

we had towels wrapped around our head that we'd taken with us to be stayed for the night

because it had an absolute meltdown and was just bonging constantly. Full chat and we just couldn't

get this bonging noise to stop and it's because of something with the door sucking it in.

So you're kind of putting your faith in something driving you at the same time it's having a meltdown.

With what you know and what you regard things and it can't even do the easy things.

With what you understand about self-driving Teslas, would you get in one and drive back

from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas for four hours? I would not. No. No. I mean, I genuinely

wouldn't. I mean, one of the first things I did when I started my research on self-driving cars

was I was living in the States at the time. I was living in Colorado and I went along to a Tesla

showroom and I got them to and I said, I'm a British person with a posh accent and I'd like to

test drive one of your cars and they went, yeah, fine. And I asked them to demonstrate what was

then called autopilot, which was a less advanced version of the technology. And I wasn't just

interested in how the technology worked or it didn't work because it was really impressive.

The first time you do any of these things, there is a sort of sense of magic that you think it

shouldn't be able to do this, but it seems to be able to do it. I was also really interested though

in the psychology of it, in a human's reaction to being driven because one of the scary things

for people that have maybe been in a waymo or sat behind the wheel of a Tesla is you switch on a

system like this and you think that is amazing and then it instantly becomes boring because if it

works, it's the most boring thing in the world. It's like being driven somewhere. You don't want

it to be interesting. You don't want it to feel like a thrill. Otherwise, you know, something's

gone wrong. And that's a well-known thing within social science is a problem that we call automation

complacency is when something purports to be automated, so an airplane autopilot maybe,

what we know happens is that people who are supposed to be in control of these systems tend

to switch off. And we as the human being do that very, very quickly. So we go, okay, this is working,

which means that if there is something that goes wrong with the technology that we don't

understand, we are very, very bad at doing what we need to do in order to safely take control

of that technology. And the sort of the switch where it's either the machine in charge or it's

the driver in charge and switching between those two things, we know that that's a really

problematic thing to do. Now, Tesla are not good at acknowledging how complicated that is,

which is why they promise that their car in effect can just drive you from one place to the other.

You say that you understand slash work with the government on these things in various areas.

How are these being allowed on the road in their current form as they are?

So in the United States, there are a lot of experts who object to them being allowed on the

road in their current form, particularly Tesla. We have just seen the regulators in the United

States, so NHTSA, they're called the National Highway Transportation Safety Authority, I think

is the acronym, are doing investigations into Tesla's technology. The United States has a

different approach, which is that if you are a company and you want to deploy some of this

technology, you can a lot of the time just do it and you can in effect take responsibility

for it yourself, the technology. And if something goes wrong, then it plays out through the courts.

In Europe, the approach is rather different, which is that you need to persuade regulators

that your technology is safe and works pretty well before you're allowed to put it on the road.

So we have all of these systems to ensure that when a regular car crashes, it crashes safely and

doesn't crush the legs of a driver and all the rest of that stuff. And so we have regulatory

systems that test these things beforehand. Do you think when the kind of normal person

with the knowledge of self-driving cars or new technology, like if I take like a

lined average of how interested the average human is in this sort of stuff,

here's that something has passed regulation to be allowed. I think we have this automatic sense of

it must be okay then. I think that's part of the worry, right? So when you're asking me if I would

get in a sort of self-driving car, one of the things that I'm doing is the same calculation that I

would do when I'm getting on board a plane, right? I don't want to have to walk around the plane and

say, does this thing look safe, right? As the passenger, I'm thinking, has somebody who knows

more about this stuff than me being around the plane, checked that it's safe and you have all

of these regulators in place and airlines that you know are going to take responsibility and you

think, yeah, I sort of can trust them and that's why. And I know that aeroplanes have very, very

few crashes, so I'm going to trust them and get on to the plane without really having to think

about it. And in the case of a self-driving car, you know, asking a user to make that calculation

is sort of unreasonable, I think, which is why it's so important for regulators to be on top of

this stuff. Because even, and actually Elon Musk has acknowledged this point, that Elon Musk has

acknowledged that the people that he's most worried about are the people that consider themselves,

you know, Tesla experts, because they're the people that might be most tempted to try out

their autopilot technology. I now feel like I'm slightly accusing you of doing this on your way

back from Las Vegas. But it's the people, you know, it's those people who think, I know about cars

and I'm going to switch this thing on and I know that if it goes wrong, I'll be able to take over.

And there's a sort of complacency that means that those people might need to be the people

that you worry about. It was really noticeable that the first person to die in a Tesla autopilot

crash was a real Tesla enthusiast. He was a YouTuber with a Tesla channel, a guy called Joshua Brown,

who back in 2016 was hurtling down a divided highway in Florida. And, well, we don't know

what happened because he died instantly. So all we have is the data from the car afterwards.

But the car passed straight underneath one of these giant American trucks,

passed straight under its trailer, crushed the top of the car, killed him instantly. And he was,

as far as we know, sort of doing an experiment with the technology, which wasn't reliable at the time.

So it begs the question, when something goes wrong, who's responsible? Is it the driver,

the developer or no one? And does that kind of vary country to country?

Yeah, well, that's one of the urgent things that needs working out. In Britain, we've just been

through a process of trying to get a bit of clarity about the rules for that. So about a year ago,

government passed the Autonomous Vehicles Act, an act of parliament that tried to clarify

under what circumstances different parts of the system would be responsible. So would it be the

driver? Would it be the person that had made the self-driving vehicle? Would it be the company,

say, operating the self-driving vehicle if it was being operated by an Uber-type fleet of cars?

Would it be the insurer? Or would it be something else?

There isn't one answer to the who's responsible in every situation. It will vary just as it does

whenever one car crashes into another car and the drivers have to hash it out with

insurance companies and the rest of it. Who do you believe should take moral accountability?

So it's not clear a priori who should be held morally liable, but what I do know is that when

it comes to new technologies, what often happens is that the people who are selling the new technology

want to evade that technology. Sorry, they want to evade responsibility for the technology,

which means that we need to be more precise about questions of responsibility when we have

new technologies. So the easy thing to do, so to go back to that Tesla example I was just mentioning,

when Joshua Brown got killed, the easy thing for Tesla to do in those circumstances and

circumstances like that is to say, well, it's the driver's fault, right? Because when you get into

a Tesla, you are supposed to have read all the small print about what your system can and can't

do and the small print will say legally you are responsible for this technology. But it's

more complicated than that because Tesla are also lulling you into thinking that this car can drive

itself and especially if they're selling a technology called full self-driving, you can be

forgiven for thinking, well, this is a technology that can drive itself. In that circumstance,

it was a case of a self-driving car crashing into a non-self-driving vehicle, which would have been

a traditional lorry. But I have seen firsthand when I've been taking Waymo's and I think I've

taken enough of them now to get a real sense of kind of what they're about. Yeah, they're like

that Waymo's get into the most problems when they're dealing with other Waymo's.

I think early on, there was a few instances where like if you come up to a crossroads with

two Waymo's, neither one of them knew which one to kind of go first. But what it does to me is it

begs the question, which is if a self-driving car crashes into another self-driving car and someone

dies, would that then just be AI battling AI? Because if the answers are so

beyond our moral compass because it's technology dealing with technology,

would we then use kind of AI to fight that battle of who's responsible?

I haven't thought about that possibility for the simple reason that there haven't been enough

self-driving cars on the road for that to be a thing that we've yet had to worry about.

Part of the issue there, the question of moral responsibility is complicated by

the fact that the technological systems are quite often opaque. So we don't know why an AI did what

it did in quite a lot of circumstances. So for anybody, like with any I'm imagining in that

example, you would have an insurance company, maybe lawyers, maybe a court if it goes to court

trying to work these things out and they'd be trying to work out who was responsible

in order to assign blame and well in America deal with amounts of money and things.

The bigger question though for society is how we can learn from things like that so that we

improve. So society's interest should be how can we make things safer over time and what we got very

good at with aeroplanes was learning from crashes. So when an aeroplane crashes, yes we want to know

well who was to blame but in lots of cases regulators will say actually we're partly

interested in who's but we're interested in how to make sure that this never happens again

and that process of learning from accidents is why we have accident investigators and all

the rest of it. So one of the other things that we're currently trying to work out with the government

is about what the requirement should be for accident investigation when it comes to something

like self-driving cars. How much for example should the police be able to take in terms of data from

a self-driving car to say well you know so that we can exactly trace the movements of this vehicle

but also trace if you like the sort of thought patterns of this vehicle to work out why it

did what it did so that we can stop that from from happening again. Many of you might not know

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for our conversation with the belief obviously that can be changed throughout our conversation

but with the belief that I believe that a self-driving vehicle is safer at the minute than

a right than a human within the vehicle and the reason that I have came to that conclusion is

actually based on a recent story that I've had to deal with in my own life which was a couple of

weeks ago I live about an hour and a half away from Gatwick airport and my other half and her

friend flew back in at one o'clock in the morning now Toby who's behind the camera tonight who

takes a lot of drives for me and I trust him implicitly because I've seen that he doesn't

fall asleep he's just awake 24 seven like monster energy and red bull powers his life

wasn't available to go and pick them up I don't drive at that time of night because I'm absolutely

useless so I deem myself as unsafe so I just know I'll have my head out the window in the cold

eventually until I have to fall asleep at Redding services yeah so I called my local taxi driver

that I knew and as airport runs to book a ride to pick them up collect them and take them back

in the belief that he would be professional safe and right to do so I then told both my girlfriend

and her friend that I trusted this man and that he'd done right for us since I was little

and I went to bed that night believing that everything was going to be okay yeah and it

wasn't he nearly crashed on the m40 from being half asleep he then nearly well he did he mounted

the verge went up the verge and they caught it on camera several times and they were so petrified

they didn't know what to do and what to say in the back of the car they also then woke up because

they were falling asleep when he couldn't find one of their addresses and it was late at night

very dark in the middle of the country he's going back towards the Cotswolds and they woke up on

a random farm and thought he was kidnapping them and you had to calm them down for a second when

my partner got in hours later in the morning after he was doing 25 mile an hour down the motorway

I was livid like like beyond angry and I just couldn't help but think in the days that followed

that if a Waymo had existed at Gatwick and I could have booked it to drive back

those two to where I live I'd have done it yeah because based off my experience in them

I believe that that vehicle won't get tired it won't lapse in concentration there's nobody

in it with any moral compass to do anything wrong and therefore you can't technically

get scared as your passengers within it so you make it feel safe and sound but

would you have still picked the taxi driver over a Tesla Robo taxi

so yeah interesting what I mean obviously not knowing what I now know about that taxi driver

right or even that you know if it was a mini cab company that mini cab company which has

betrayed your trust right your trust in what you thought was a safe system involving a

human being and that's why we have rules about who isn't who isn't allowed to drive and if you're

a professional you know the circumstances in which you're allowed to drive and you know having breaks

and not driving tired and all the and all the rest of that and in in that version you know there

is a sense in which profoundly you have been let down by that person who has broken those those

rules just to take a step way back though to why people are interested in self-driving vehicles

it's really important to remember the flaws of human driving and this is something that

drivers often aren't willing to admit to themselves but yes humans most of the time

are fine and most of the time there aren't incidents but we also know our deep down know

that we have important flaws and we know that fallibility can be really really dangerous

and we all you know know people who you know will occasionally break those rules whether it's

speeding or drink driving or anything else and that should rightly terrify us plus we have

the stats on how many people die on the year i mean so more than a million people every year die

as a result of the technology of the motor car right which is a brilliant technology that has

enabled all sorts of social benefits but it also has this massive massive risk this giant risk that

you know if for other technologies if you said we're going to you know enable you to do all

these brilliant things and go and travel places and work in different places but

a million more than a million people a year will die of this thing right so if you're an

engineer you're thinking well how can we solve that problem and that i think is some of the real

excitement behind trying to develop these forms of automation and i can i can totally see that

do you think that number is going to skyrocket in the next 10 years on a graph

i so i i look at some of the trends and there are reasons to be optimistic that

actually a lot of places like britain lots of european countries are getting much safer every

year right so if you're in a car um on the whole you get safer and safer every year because you

technology around you improves and all the rest of it but then you get some some reasons to be

rather depressed about it like the stats in the us are not going down so the us is not on

average getting much safer which is which is rather sad i can probably ask you to guess why

you think the us is getting more dangerous for driving do you think that is down to the self

driving i don't it's definitely not down to anything to do with self driving just because

the numbers aren't big enough yet but it is down to technology at least in part a bit like my van

breaking scenario but it's actually it's it's people it's distracted driving right so that's

the big new risk that's happened the last 10 20 years is people on cell phones which in the us

you know they are more relaxed about than than we are here in here in europe so there are reasons

in terms of what the technology of self driving will do you know to go back to your example about

how you make a calculation between human drivers and and and and robot drivers one of the things

that we should be interested in and one of the things that we should be trying to work out is

yes averages so on average our self driving cars safer than human beings but my sense as a sociologist

my sense is that ordinary people won't just be thinking about that they'll also be thinking about

can i trust that a self driving car is going to be good in this circumstance that i know a human

will be really good at and vice versa so we also want to know under what conditions a self

driving car will fail and one of the weird things is that you know robots and humans do not drive in

the same way so actually robots will fail in a different way from humans like the phantom braking

stuff right humans are not going to get freaked out when a shadow comes from a from a bridge but

if you're relying upon a particular system that deals with those sorts of things and has to make

decisions about about that then that might be a new risk so if i were to book you a vehicle or give

you the choice and booking a vehicle from Gatwick Heathrow airport right across through the centre

of London to the other side with all the challenges it faces and i gave you the opportunity of being

driven by a driver in a tesla that would likely use itself driving finishes versus an uber yeah

which one are you choosing where do you feel safest i'm probably so in both circumstances

i would trust the driver now if you were to take you know put my trust in the driver which also

means putting trust in the driver to use the technologies that they have at their disposal

right so if though waymo or tesla said well we're going to trial our technology and and take a

take a and we think it's good enough and we're not going to have a human behind the the steering

wheel then that would be a different sort of calculation because then i'd be thinking well

who do i trust that this technology has been well tested what do i know about what's going on

behind the scenes of the of the technology which is another thing that we should talk about you

know even though there's nobody behind the wheel there are always people behind the scenes helping

these helping these things out so you would make that trust decision based on what you knew about

about the system in the case of it being you know gatwick to london through london the things that

i would know was that well actually nobody has yet tested their technologies on that route therefore

nobody knows if they can do it well and when you're driving in los angeles when you're in

in a waymo in los angeles one of the things that i'm imagining you think that enables you to trust

the system is you you know that waymo have been shuttling around those streets now for a few years

right they're pretty well known streets so they're that massively reduces than possible surprises

it seems to me from the research i've done that there are several big players attempting to bring

that exact thing to london to the uk as fast as possible one of them i've read is uber equating

by 2027 they'll have their full self driveless cars and taxis available in london to kind of ferry

people around a bit like what you said about elon making statements about stuff that don't

actually come to frish for you later do you think that that is likely or unlikely i think that's

unlikely um so there is the it's really important to realize there is a huge amount of hype um

because you know the companies involved know that they they want to be associated with this new

technology right everybody wants to be at the front and some of them well some of them imagine

that it's a race you know i don't think it is a race in that one person is going to win and then

you know stitch up self driving across the whole world because one of the things that we know about

different places is that forms of transport look very different across those those different places

uber were one of the most interesting companies in this space back in the day so you know in the

sort of 2016 to 2018 period um and one of the reasons i got interested in this stuff in the

first place so after tesla had had a few crashes actually the most prominent and most shocking

crash involving a self-driving car was a test a prototype uh volvo being tested in

arizona by uber so they this this was just a prototype it just had a um a safety driver

behind the wheel um and that uh in 2018 that vehicle ran into and killed a woman who was

pushing a bicycle across one of these big american wide uh wide roads um and uber stopped their self

driving car program after that because that was one of those moments when actually regulators

did wake up and say we don't want our roads to be a laboratory for the testing of technologies

that don't seem to work um and uber it was felt were going too fast too quickly they were doing

irresponsibly they didn't have a good system of you know making sure that if something goes wrong

there's a human there to um to to take over and and and all the rest of it so they've only actually

relatively recently resuscitated their self-driving efforts in collaboration with some of these some

of these other companies this is pro linebacker tj watt and i'm back with ypb by evercrombie for

another active wear drop my second co-design collection has new shorts and tanks that keep up

with all my in-season workouts and their new restore collection is a game changer off the

field too because even pro athletes like me need rest days shop ypb by evercrombie in the app

online and in stores because your personal best is greater than anything

we're in london right now i'm growing up as much as i think about the positives like everyone

does about a place or a city or the things that you want to go and see you know big ben the london

eye the hustle and the bustle the people the cultures everything about it that makes it great

but you also remember the moments that are truly shocking and um terror springs to mind i've just

watched the documentary i was too young at the time about what happened with the bombings on the

tube and the buses which were truly shocking and every now and then we get a reminder of how dangerous

terrorism could be do you see that as a huge risk to cars that are automated driven by a network

so well i think this is one of those areas right where we need to be really clear on not just

is the technology on average say for the human driven cars but what how might those risks change

how might technologies be vulnerable in different ways from human beings and one of the risks that

people especially sort of cyber security people have already identified is that if you have fleets

of connected vehicles you potentially create you know they talk about things like attack surfaces

you take you create new vulnerabilities where somebody could take control and you know bricks

say an entire fleet of vehicles which are all dependent on this on this system all up to 200

mile an hour and off you go yeah or just you know turn them off more boringly and stop people from

being able to get where they need to where they need to go so you introduce new vulnerabilities

that having you know you know properly so the word autonomous is normally associated with

autonomous vehicles but you can talk about human beings having autonomy and one of the

things that we value when it comes to driving is the autonomy the freedom to be able to drive when

and where we want and that's our choice not the choice of you know Tesla or whoever is is is

operating that fleet so yeah we should be worried about the new risks that that these new technological

systems create and it's not just the idea that you've got a car you've plucked out the human

you've dropped in a computer and everything else stays the same right it's not going to be like

that in order to get self-driving working in a safe way you might have to completely reconfigure

your system so that the cars are all connected to each other and to some base in order to you

know make the thing safe i think the normal human beings everyday access to autonomy is probably

chat tbt and i always say wrong chat tbt i've got this the crazy pro one at the minute and i'm playing

around with loads of different things and what i find fascinating is you can kind of see that

consciousness ability of it starting to come through you know the way it speaks to you the

way it connects with you right it's becoming a little bit different and when people refer to

self-driving cars the the argument for ages has been oh what does the car do when the child runs

out in front of the car and there's like a group of guys over there does the car go into the guys

or drive into the child like what would you the car do what would the system do compared to a person

but it's it opens the door to ask a really good question which is how much of an autonomous

vehicle is being led by ai versus kind of systems and processes like you'd program a robot at school

as a kid yeah and it's and and this is one of those areas again where we can we can we can really tie

ourselves in knots about it so you know i think we've probably all had that that weird experience

with something like chat gpt right or a large language model where you think this is eerie this

is magical is there something going on here you know and and and people have already sort of

ascribed sentience to it and and the computer scientists would stamp down on that very quickly

and say no that is you as a human being and doing something that we know happens right which is

anthropomorphizing which is in the same way as you know we talk to our pets it's very easy to assume

that there's more going on there than is actually going on there it's ultimately just you know

predicting the next word and and doing it really really effectively in the case of a self-driving

car one of the things that the companies developing these things have to make decisions about is how

much autonomy they give to the decision-making within the car itself versus how much you program

in rules in itself so in the case of driving you know obviously the rules of the road something

like a speed limit tesla already got into trouble that for example their full self-driving system

sorry full self-driving system put that in quotes because it's definitely not full self-driving

um was making decisions that broke the official rules of the road in the united states like

rolling slowly through stop signs and doing that sort of thing but those are things that

almost everybody almost every human does so there's a really difficult trade-off you know do you

obey the strict rules of the road or do you do what humans do which is to you know recognize

that there are gray areas and lots of times when you'll have to make a decision um when you know

or you do it because everybody else does it right it's more of a norm than a rule what do you think

say fest um i think in the case of an automated technology most people would expect those technologies

to obey the rules of the road more strictly than they would expect humans to so it's much harder

to forgive a self-driving vehicle for breaking the speed limit for example because

we sort of know that a self-driving vehicle can easily just or just just limit itself

but there are some interesting examples like at the moment in in europe we have the introduction of

intelligent speed um what's it called intelligent speed assist or whatever it is but technologies

that can stop you from speeding um which should be really good for public safety but also lots of

people disagree with them because they feel like their freedom is being is being constrained so it's

one of these areas where you know it's complicated and to pretend that it's just an easy thing to do

if you're programming a self-driving vehicle you know because ultimately the sort of central point

if you're an engineer making a self-driving vehicle you are involved in one of the most

interesting technologies out there right now but but you've got to work out all sorts of complicated

things about how to drive through a world that is ultimately being designed for and around human

beings does a regulator understand that technology though i think one of the things that regulators

will have to do in the next decade or so is is is come to understand more about the technology

at the moment i don't think they do um in the case of so some of the crashes that i discussed in the

united states one of the things that's happened is that the crash investigators for those have

had to come to understand the technology really really quickly and i spoke to some of the crash

investigators and it was really interesting getting their sense because these these guys know

everything about you know road safety or air safety and they're the people that

investigate plane crashes and everything else and when it comes to a self-driving car crash and they

go what went on here and we don't know why this thing did what it did so can we look at the

data within the within the car's computer and sometimes that data doesn't reveal everything

that you want to know about about what it does so there might be actually limits on how much we

can understand about about why a technology has made a decision that it's that it's made for

that make this really difficult which is why we need the people developing the technology to

behave more responsibly than they're behaving at the moment over 300 000 uk workers depend on

driving income whether that's logistics you know driving lorries that's driving amazon vans around

automation and self-driving vehicles could trigger the collapse of one of the biggest

industries in the uk and we keep coming back to los angeles and you know lands far far away to

many britains but it's happening there you drive down the road in a waymo and a shopping trolley

that is powered by a battery goes past you to drop off someone's goods yeah or a waymo full of

someone's order that they've ordered and the guy guys come out and put it in the way it's

sensing on its way and you can now have food delivered and a great example of why someone

would choose one over the other as well is i got two quotes to get back to the airport from where

i was in la in pre-knowing that i'd have this conversation at some point and wanting to refer

to it and the uber was 58 dollars sending back to the airport and the waymo was 22 it was like

more than a 50 percent difference between the two so do you think if you if you were working

as a lorry driver amazon delivery driver and considered that to be a long-term

income would you be worried so i mean yes i would be worried i mean there's a you know

some of the things that you talked about just there though are disruptions that have happened to

people's livelihoods that don't have anything to do with with automation or where the forms of

automation are quite so here in london for example 20 years ago if you were a black cab driver you

might have you know quite a nice wage and the big disruption to have come for you is likely to have

been uber right which is not because there's a robot driving the car but because there's

one company that decides that it can do a clever thing involving the market for in effect mini

cabs right massive massive disruption to how people driving make money in in london and who

that is is is opened up to i mean i've already expressed skepticism with the speed of the arrival

of of the technology simply because these environments are quite complicated

ones for robots to to drive around in you know places places like london give us an example

what of a complicated what of why london to someone that might live in australia or new

zealand i know it listens to why london creates a such a challenge compared to la because most

of la just as a starting point is a grid system right right absolutely and so so if you've been

to cities in the united states you might know how roads work that there's often multiple lanes the

junctions are often governed by traffic lights which you know in sort of digital terms are quite

useful on or off technologies in london your you know the first thing to recognize about

the middle of london is that it predates the the road layout predates the arrival of the

motor car by hundreds of years right so the so the the the oldest bits of the city are you know

roman medieval which means that the roads were not designed for cars let alone self-driving cars

it means some of our junctions are complicated we have things like roundabouts that rather than

being on or off from much more sort of gray areas about judgment which are a harder thing for a

self-driving car to have to deal with i could often take my students out of my classroom

and show them different roads around london so my university is quite near euston road which was

one of these a fairly modern road introduced in london in the 1960s which has a particular design

philosophy around it which is that it segregates off pedestrians buses

cycles and cars right so they each have their lane and those forms of transport stay in their

lane literally um there are other bits of london so if you go to there's a road called exhibition

road which is where all the museums are which is something called shared space where the designers

have said actually we're going to blur the lines between the pavement and the and the road

we're going to make the cars go slower because the cars might expect that a pedestrian is going

to walk in front of them at any time right so it's a different design philosophy designed

around human perception really really hard to go through there if you're a self-driving car because

those you've introduced just much more uncertainty into that system i've got a um a roundabout near

me and people living in that local area will probably be commenting on this now because it's

famous but have you ever heard of the magic rather the famous magic roundabout in swinton

yeah and it is it's near me but do you think when we speak about regulation we speak about

true autonomy and self-driving cars we speak about road mapping and you're obviously very

vocal on the fact that london and the uk presents different challenges to america do you think it's

possible for a self-driving car to get through the regulations allow full autonomy of someone like me

to buy five tesla robo taxis and send my fleet out to work every day and crack on with it but

they just wouldn't map that one roundabout because it's just one thing in the uk do you think that's

going to slip through and be where a lot of problems lie so i think it's that sort of thing

though that might yeah it might be where where problems lie right so this is why i think rather

than saying rather than asking when will i have myself driving car right asking where becomes

more powerful because it might well be that actually expecting your tesla to drive all the

way from bristol via swindon to norwich or somewhere you know is going to be impossible because

no company will invest in the sort of in what needs to go on behind the scenes which is things like

digital mapping right it's like making those things um more predictable so that that route

becomes possible but if you want to get a cab from one side of milton keens to the other right and

milton keens is a much more american seeming sort of grid layout car and uh car environment you might

that might well be possible um relatively soon and that's and actually a lot of these companies

are testing in and around milton keens for this reason because it it feels like quite a good sort

of a good laboratory to all my loyal listeners listening on spotify apple and other streaming

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do you think we'll get to a point in your island's lives where 50 percent of the road is buzzing

around without operators in the vehicles so that so this is the other part of the of the challenge

right and i think this is definitely worth considering if the technology is genuinely

beneficial and society agrees and government agrees that yes we really want to encourage

this technology in the same way as you know in london they want to encourage people to cycle for

example so what do they do they don't just tell people to cycle they try to make the environment

better for cycling okay so if you really wanted to support self-driving technology one of the

things that you would do is is to say okay well what sort of infrastructure would we need

in order to make this technology safe and reliable and and then you'd start to look at the magic

roundabout in swindon and say hmm that's gonna be that's always going to be difficult for self-driving

cars but if we replaced it by a system of traffic lights for example then um then it might become

more predictable now if you do that you're also going to piss off some other people right and as

with any big government decision about infrastructure and transport you're going to have some people that

like it and some people that hate it and you're going to have a battle between those between

those people um because ultimately roads are quite political and the other thing i show my

students quite often is a zebra crossing right and a zebra crossing is a particular form of

infrastructure that doesn't exist everywhere in the world and is interpreted differently in those

places that it does exist but is a particular form of conversation that you have between different

sorts of road users right and you see it played out all the time when a driver approaches a zebra

crossing or a pedestrian approaches a zebra crossing and they have a form of negotiation

based on some what they would hope shared understandings about who has right of way and what and if

it works well people pass safely and the traffic isn't delayed for too long and everybody goes about

their lives right but that conversation is really hard for a self-driving car to do because it doesn't

do conversation because there's a weird connection between a driver and the person is out to cross

exactly the zebra crossing it's hard to put a finger up yeah and often the communication is

you know through a raised eyebrow or it might be a hand gesture all these sorts of things

now some self-driving car companies have tried to come up with other ways to deal with that

interaction which is where things could get really interesting so they've said well maybe what we

need is self-driving cars that communicate their intentions to a pedestrian and make them sort of

more more conversational or you say well actually zebra crossings are really annoying if you're a

self-driving car so can we just switch them all over to you know pelican crossings where there's

a traffic light and everybody knows when they're supposed to go that would obviously in some respects

potentially take more time than it would just to put the self-driving cars on the road especially

if they're up to speed somewhere like LA at the rate that AI is improving would would money just

prevail because this industry is going to be enormous to the first person that kind of wins

because it'll be their brand whether it be Waymo whether it be Zook that's training up on the streets

at the minutes let us drive around or whether it's you're launching their thing in the UK if you

were like a bus driver in London where if you look at a bus company it's got all the salaries

that it needs to pay but I don't mean London might be a Milton Keynes or a Sage Coast or a

Price in Swindon would you be thinking if that's going to give you a longevity of career right

now so I think buses are a really interesting one because again I think we can get stuck in the car

thing right and because most people most of the time their their their the go-to form of

transport will be a car and that will be the size of object that they identify with they maybe

don't think so much about buses but actually I think self-driving buses could be a really

interesting and beneficial form of the technology for all sorts of reasons right because you can

imagine them having dedicated lanes and you can imagine you know they do predictable things they

do the same thing over and over and over again you want them to be really safe etc etc um

it may well be that some bus routes are really good targets for automation right does that mean

that all bus drivers are going to be put out of work well probably not because at the moment we

expect our bus drivers to do quite a lot of different things and respond to all forms types

of uncertainty plus two other things that aren't just driving you know they also have a role in

if you're like policing the the the technology so I think a lot of passengers would be unsure

about getting onto a bus that had no professionals on it because if something started kicking off

with a fellow passenger you'd think well what happens here you said you think the scaremongering

of everyone's going to lose their jobs AI is going to take over and by 2035 70% of all vehicles on

the road are going to be automated or driving autonomously do you think that's an incorrect

statement I think it is yeah I don't I don't think necessarily it's scaremongering right so

statements like that often come from people who want to encourage the excitement about the technology

and say it's all moving really really fast and it's really exciting and you need to get on this train

right because it is it is sighted when 300 000 people lose their jobs well so that's it and

they're often but often the people who are giving you the most hype are are the ones that are least

able to deal with those the possible threats that rapid automation might might have if AI

is extremely extremely clever far cleverer than you or I because of the rate it is learning

and especially super intelligent AI then why do we need someone to work on the self-driving car

when does it become just AI works on the self-driving car oh well you see I'm not sure we are I'm not

sure anybody's thinking about that yet for the simple reason that the the context in which this

technology will have to operate and operate safely is so unavoidably human and I think that's why it's

so interesting that if we are not just to develop the technology but also to govern the technology

and make sensible decisions about the technology you need to understand a road a place in all of its

human richness right so you want humans to be there contributing to making that making that work

and dealing with the trade-offs that will always happen when you're trying to you know change

who it is that's able to to to move about in because ultimately you know roads are are shared

spaces it's not like um you know something like uh the tube network or somewhere in London which is

actually an entirely closed off space where it's actually becomes rather an easy engineering

challenge and you can imagine you know deploying AI systems to make the tube more efficient that

becomes quite an easy problem compared to the road space where do you think the people that have lost

their jobs are going to be displaced to though if there's no need for them in the technologies the

technology is cleverer than us so what I mean this is a classic problem of

of economic progress I won't say technological progress because often the thing that these

sort of disruptions come not from particular technologies but from economic disruptions

that that might be you know caused by changing business models or or changing economic structures

or changing patterns of immigration there might be all sorts of of things and one of the things

that modern societies has to deal with is that um is the sometimes rapid changes in people's

people's livelihood so I spoke about Uber I mean the changing economy of a London taxi driver

um has been pretty pretty rapid right and it happened that the in the grand scheme of things

you know the transition of Britain's economy from a manufacturing economy to a service economy has

had profound implications for how we think about careers and how we think about education and and

all of those sorts of things so yes automation will be a part of that but it won't be the only

part of that if you could squeeze the brake pedal on the deployment of self-driving car

features in the UK right now would you squeeze it or press the accelerator I so I tend to reject

the analogy I think the interesting analogy is with is with the steering wheel right so at the

moment I look at the development of the technology and I say it seems to be going in that direction

is that the best thing for society well I'm not sure it is I can really see some of the potential

benefits why don't you think it so I I think there are enormous potential benefits to make our roads

safer more efficient to allow people that currently aren't able to drive to move about

right massive massive potential benefits but at the moment the technology is largely being

steered by a few companies who I don't think have the public interest in mind right I mean

you know they have um sometimes the interests of companies and the public interest might align but

the job of regulators to be would be to make sure that those things are better lined up so

I think there's all sorts of things that government needs to do to um force companies to be a bit

safer to know more about when these technologies fail so that we can learn about how to make them

safer overall um I think we can do things like ensuring that the technology is developed in

such a way as it benefits people who currently don't have access to many forms of transport

rather than goes to places like San Francisco Los Angeles where it's actually that's where all the

money is there's a difference between you think and they will because often every human being in

England thinks the government should do something whether they actually do will execute a very

misaligned especially at the minute to do you think the things that should be done will actually

be done or do you think we risk the opportunity of a lot of very premature systems being allowed on

the road that have grave impact that we've never seen before so that is a risk I mean I do I am

relatively optimistic for what we're doing here in the UK you know I think there is the opportunity

for the UK to come up with some really good rules that mean that we do actually get the benefits of

the technology without deploying some systems that I mean it's not just deploying systems that

aren't safe but it's also deploying systems that then people end up hating which might turn them off

the technology right which would be which would be really bad and then they just think oh I don't

want to go anywhere near that whereas actually if you can bring people with you and and get people

to to trust you then it's good in the long run and so I'm I am pretty optimistic that the UK's

taking taking a good approach here but ultimately you know the challenge that you've identified is

a democratic one and that's that's what it comes down to for me as a social scientist is that it

this is a democratic question it's not just about leaving the technology to its own devices

so as a social scientist you'll know that many cars and technology is there already if you're

able to now sell a new car and that new car has to have lane assist technology on it has to have

anti-breaking technology on it because it's deemed that it's more safe for that vehicle to have it

then genuinely I find this question so baffling it's unbelievable and I actually had it with the

head of Devon's road policing I was talking to him about it which is this mobile phone

your car if you're in a Tesla funnily enough like the Cybertruck can you pick it up and try and take

a picture of the steering wheel if it's doing autonomous driving it will go berserk like it

will go mad that you've picked up the phone but like if the technology is there to essentially

go mental provide a warning that you've done something and then potentially

pull the car off to the hard shoulder and park up if you persist to do it right why aren't we

executing that technology yet if like one of the biggest deaths on UK roads is through

I mean so I think it's you know there are there are some really interesting questions like this

like like you know automated speed limits is one of the challenges I like to discuss

you know because it would be technologically really easy I mean you know the technology

involved in monitoring a driver to check that they're paying attention in the car is actually

extremely complicated the technology that says you mustn't go above the speed limit right we've

actually had that technology for decades and decades and decades why don't we use it because

you know it would alarm a lot of people they would feel like their freedom is being threatened

and there are particular things about cars and people's attitudes to you know the car as a personal

space and and feeling regulated in a car that that mean that it's quite hard to deploy some of these

some of these technologies I think one of the challenges that self-driving car companies will

face which I don't think they've really contended with is the fact that car culture is quite

libertarian right even though oddly you know the irony is that when we're in a car we're probably

subject to more rules than in any other aspect of our of our life we feel free and in charge

and car companies have been selling us this ideal of freedom right as because that's what a car

offers right it's great affordance it's great benefit is that a car can enable you to become

a free moving individual in control of your own of your own destiny which means that if you say oh

and here's a technology that will keep you safe I mean you need to look back at the campaign both

of us too too young to remember the campaign to introduce seat belts right massive resistance

to the idea of seat belts and people refuse to put them on big public information campaign just

to get people to wear their seat belts and then they got mandated and then they got you know it

that is now illegal not to not to wear them and that's a technology just you know that stops people

from flying through their own windscreens what's one prediction you're willing to make about self

driving cars before 2035 that we won't have very many of them in London that would be that would

be my my prediction well no hang on because had you asked me I may have said like five years ago

I may have said the same thing about American cities and the one thing that I've been taken

by surprise by and this is why normally I resist prediction because all predictions are going to

be wrong I've been really taken by surprise and impressed by the speed with which Waymo have

rolled out their vehicles in those cities not just doing a few journeys but having now substantial

numbers of of cars I was fast asleep in one I went to sleep for 40 minutes well it drove me

from A to B and I don't know there's nothing else going on in the car I mean that's amazing and it

woke me up bonging when I got there so that is the ultimate the ultimate test of a technology that

works right if it's doing its job it should be so boring that you you know lose interest because

I imagine I mean so let me ask you about this when you first got in it there must have been some

sort of sense of novelty some surprise oh my god yeah the first sort of the first time I took

when I actually vlogged the whole thing right because I do car stuff I post it on social media

why wouldn't I it's a significant thing to to go in a first vehicle that has no driver in it and

you're going to put your trust in it your faith in it and watch what it does is a significant thing

so the first thing that happened was it pulled up on the wrong side of the road

which I thought was almost comedic because I'm about to trust the thing to to get in it

and now I've now got across the road okay how did it not know that I was on this side the side

that it came in on is that it turned around and parked on the other side yeah so across the road

I went to get in it there was a sense of strangeness about the fact I opened the boot

put my bag in it and was going to close the boot before opening the door to get in the car like

is it going to drive off with my bag because you're so unfamiliar to it yeah um and all these

things creeping about the experience that you're so unused to in normal kind of day-to-day life

when in reality you could put your bag in an uber or a taxi in London you have no idea you could

just shoot off it's easy this is a Louis Vuitton bag I couldn't be god knows what but you at least

make some assumptions about there being a driver who's so yeah that you that you trust which is

crazy because really that Waymo has no other intention or heart than really to take you to

for me to be but then I got in the vehicle I got in the back because I think that when you're on

your own you have these novelty sense of importance rather than getting in the front of a vehicle it's

like you're being chauffeur driven by something yeah so I got into the back you tap the screen away

you go um and within two and a half minutes I thought was the best thing in the world yeah

because I was just like oh my god it's doing it I knew it was gonna do it I knew it was gonna do

it because I'd seen it do it on video yeah there's millions of them buzzing around I mean genuinely

every street you turn down now I'm not even joking every street you turn down now you see one they are

everywhere and it's just a really strange a really strange experience for the first time being in one

but one that A wore off really quickly but B convinced me that that is the method of transport

that I would take in in LA did you find yourself sort of judging its driving style and because I mean

you know about cars so I'm imagining you were interested in well how is it going to deal with

this or how's it going to go too fast or too slow um some friends of mine lent me a Jaguar F type

and it wouldn't fit my mrs bag in the boot it was on the final day when we had to go back from

our hotel to where I keep my other studio and that meant that I needed to figure out a way of

getting me and my other half back to where we keep the van studio say goodbye to everybody

close up and all the rest of it then go to the airport but I couldn't get this other bag in

F type so I ordered a Waymo on my phone and I followed the Waymo in an F type

now I can't confirm I can't confirm or deny and it'd be really interesting for people in the

States that have taken them to comment below if this is correct or true or not but a journey

that should have taken 12 minutes took 26 minutes and I almost felt like the Waymo thought it was

being followed or tracked and was doing cut some kind of anti-arrow and was trying to lose

technically I genuinely did start to believe that because it would kind of go down and right on

lane then cut across to and then go left and I sort of fascinated I've never actually looked

into whether it it was doing that or if it was just trying to avoid traffic in LA blacks up

really quickly or whether it thought this this random vehicle has been tailing me since we left

like why is that I found that quite so one thing that these these companies do which is totally

understandable right is that they're trying to reduce risk so all these the the companies have

a set of priorities at any one time and they and Waymo one of the good things I trust about Waymo

is that they prioritize safety over other things which means that a lot of the time they will

take a longer route to avoid really complicated junctions for example and it does mean that

a quite a few people have complained that this is not the quickest way to the airport right because

they might they might rather do like a series of three right turns than one left turn across

traffic in American roads and things and which which makes sense right but but you have to sort

of try and work out if that's the truth from the outside the only time I've not felt safe in a Waymo

for a few minutes is funnily enough when there wasn't somebody in it that could have broken the

law right and the reason behind that statement is my love had a window down in a group of

very American gangster looking lads saw her pretty girl like that was their full interest was my

partner in the car on a road not too far away from skid row in downtown LA we put the window up

there immediately shouting behind us wolf whistling everything the car did not know that was going

on the car it's just going to follow its route at its normal pace where if it had been me driving

potentially hired something quick I like my cars like I could have been in a cyber truck could have

been in a v8 Chevrolet so I'd have absolutely nailed it I'd have been gone I wouldn't have

given a damn about the speed limit I'd have just been gone then out of there and I think that kind

of ability to kind of break that curfew yeah when it's safe to do so in your opinion or it's going

to have a benefit to you it was the only time that I've not felt safe in one but also you feel

powerless in that moment right because you are in the hands of a system that you don't understand

and you don't know what the what the expectations were but the attractiveness is I'm in a very

fortunate position I travel a lot got some good businesses if I really wanted to choose an uber

driver every time to get around LA even if it was 40 minutes and 50 60 dollars I'm in a fortunate

position I could do so however even me feeling in that position being in that echelon couldn't

help in the end but add up the difference between what a waymo would cost right and an uber would

cost and worked out that over the course of two weeks in LA you're saving nearly a thousand

dollars on a lot of journey by taking waymo's because they're half the price compared to ubers

so that's the thing I think we don't we don't yet know about another thing that we don't know about

when it comes to self-driving vehicles is what it would take for them to be a cheaper option

because a lot of people will be seeing this as a nakedly economic calculation like they did with

uber you know am I going to take a black cab in London and we're going to take an uber well the

uber's half price right and then we also know that ubers over time got more expensive because

they reduced their subsidies because one of these the things that a new company will do

is subsidize these services while they're being tested or rolled out to see what the market will

take into attract customers and all the rest of it we still don't know how expensive a fully

functioning self-driving car system will be I mean what we know at the moment

Robotaxi $26,000 so but in terms of the the so you've got the vehicle right now a waymo vehicle

is a lot more expensive than a Tesla Robotaxi because it is absolutely covered you will see in

some really really expensive high-end sensors amazing sensors far better than anything on a Tesla

Robotaxi which means that the things themselves cost a lot of money now that maybe isn't a problem

if you're using them all the time and generating so much economic value day and night plus your

saving money from not having a driver but one of the things that we don't know and the companies

don't really want to tell us very much about is how many other people are involved you know what

the labour costs are behind the behind the scenes how big's the time so when you're in your waymo

one of the the other things that makes it trustworthy is that if it goes wrong

there are actual people available to remotely operate it right you've got people on customer

support you've got people who are able to redirect the car out of trouble we had an incident the other

day in Arizona where waymos were driving into floods right and they're remote operators because

the systems aren't good at detecting floods and you don't get very many floods in Arizona

so the remote operators had to redirect them out of out of there right so there are people

behind the scenes we don't know how expensive the whole system is the challenge if you're one of

those companies will be can you make the system more efficient so that you can guarantee that it

will carry on being cheaper than a than a conventional uber and we just don't know at the moment so

what is what do you think the biggest risk with self-driving cars is right now to humanity do you

think it's that terror impact how well we secure getting in and out of it but the system itself

i think i mean the thing i've observed the last 10 years or so as we've seen sort of society's

experiment self-driving cars is that the things that are gonna bug us are not likely to be

big you know high-profile crashes or massive terror attacks they're likely to be a series of

rather small boring things like the price of a thing like you know where can this thing go you

know like um will this thing park in uh there have been some incidents where in san francisco

they parked in the wrong place and pissed off the local decision makers and you just sort of think

it might be that the bugs people right it might be cars bricking in the middle of traffic light

junctions and causing traffic jams and that's not dangerous but it might really test the patients of

local residents and it might mean that the experiment with self-driving cars isn't allowed to grow

properly that's why i would like to see this better regulated so that we can get some of the benefits

but not necessarily drive into those uh dead ends what do you think the biggest myth is that you'd

like to kill as we close upstairs about it what what my perception or someone's perception of a

tesla model 3 walking running down the m4 and someone's not got their hands on the steering wheel

what do you think's like and i'm and i'm fine with that in the car next to it what do you think the

biggest like myth is that you like to maybe bust um tesla has its own set of myths but i don't think

that that's the you know because tesla is selling something called full self-driving technology that

is not full self-driving right but i don't think that's the um the biggest thing that i think the

most important thing to know about the technology is that a self-driving car is never going to drive

like a human and therefore comparing it to a human might not be the best way to to to make

decisions about these actually if we want the technology to succeed we're going to have to

recognize that robots will drive really differently and we'll have to make decisions based upon that

Jack i think there was absolutely fabulous you've given us an insight into something that many people

think about but only for a few minutes without knowing actually everything behind it around it

and what it could become so i want to thank you so much for giving me over an hour of your time

in the back of my van studio in the middle of london where potentially in the future 10 20 30

years from now but we never know based on la maybe sooner we'll be pulling up to do another podcast but

tobey will be in the middle seat rather than the driver's seat so thank you very much and i'll see

you then ben thank you it's been a pleasure

Self Driving Car Expert: These Are The Only Driving Jobs That Will Remain In 2030! Dr. Jack Stilgoe

About this episode

self-driving cars

Waymo

Tesla Model

Tesla Model 3

autonomous driving

full self-driving

autopilot

Rolls-Royce Phantom

phantom braking

Sprinter

anti-braking feature

Tesla Cybertruck

Chevrolet Corvette

NHTSA

vehicle safety regulations

driver-assistance technology

Tesla

connected cars

digital mapping

steering wheel

automated speed limits

automotive safety technology

Jaguar F Type

V8 engine

Robotaxi

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