In a Driverless World, Who Loses and Who Wins?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Freakonomics Radio — In a Driverless World, Who Loses and Who Wins?

Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
Episode: In a Driverless World, Who Loses and Who Wins?
Host: PJ Vogt (Search Engine), presented by Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics Radio)
Date: March 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode continues a two-part investigation into the impact of driverless cars—focusing specifically on the social, economic, and political upheaval caused as these vehicles begin to enter American cities, with Boston as a test case. Through the lens of Boston’s heated debate, host PJ Vogt explores who stands to lose, who could win, and why finding compromise is so difficult as disruptive technology meets entrenched human interests.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Evolution from Human-Driven to App-Based, to Driverless

• Abdi Aziz’s Story (02:53–09:48)
  • Background: Abdi Aziz, a Boston driver since the 1990s, explains how driving used to be a stable, union-protected job with limited licenses (“medallions”).
  • Uber’s Disruption: In 2011, Uber essentially dismantled the old system, allowing almost anyone to drive, undermining medallion value and job stability.
    • Quote: “You didn’t come here to help us. You come here to kill this business. Okay, you knew, I knew.” (04:02 — Abdi Aziz)
  • Reluctant Adaptation: Abdi quickly realized resistance was futile—“If you cannot beat them, join them.” (06:14)
  • Working for Uber: Became an Uber recruiter and driver; initially, pay was better, but over time, company policies changed, reducing driver pay and increasing uncertainty.
  • Unionization: As conditions worsened, Abdi became an organizer for a new app-drivers union.

2. The New Threat: Waymo and Driverless Cars

• Waymo as the Next Disruptor (09:13–09:48)
  • Perspective: Abdi perceives Waymo’s expansion as aiming to “kill the drivers,” finishing what Uber started.
    • Quote: “When Uber came, their aim was to kill taxi business. Now Waymo is to kill the drivers.” (09:27 — Abdi Aziz)

3. Boston’s Political and Social Backdrop

• Union Town Dynamics (12:29–15:14)
  • Political Context: Boston’s identity as a “union town” shapes both politics and policy. City leaders and the Teamsters (and other unions) champion the cause of protecting union jobs, seeing automation as a direct threat.
    • Quotes:
      • “Boston is a union town.” (15:14–15:25 — Multiple speakers)
      • “We want to protect our workers.” (15:20 — PJ Vogt)
  • Raucous Hearings: City council meetings over potential Waymo deployment feel like political rallies, focused far more on jobs than safety.

4. Drivers’ Human Stories and the Politics of Labor

• Personal Impact Stories (15:45–16:19)
  • Human drivers testify about the dignity of their work and the personal value they provide, including cases where drivers have saved lives in medical emergencies—a point the robot revolution can’t replicate.
  • Union Solidarity: A coalition, Labor United Against Waymo, unites to fight driverless car deployment.

5. Disability Rights and Accessibility: A Competing Moral Claim

• Carl Richardson’s Story (35:15–44:41)
  • Perspective Flip: Carl Richardson, deafblind advocate, testifies at the hearing—not for jobs, but for autonomy.
    • Quote: “Do you know how many jobs I’ve turned down because I can’t get there?” (37:36 — Carl Richardson)
  • Transportation Barriers: Carl highlights persistent discrimination he faces using Uber/Lyft (including frequent driver refusals due to his service dog).
  • Former Driver: The loss of his vision meant the loss of a cherished independence—now, driverless cars present a way to reclaim that.
    • Quote: “I now believe someday… we might have to convince the politicians you don’t need to have eyesight to be able to have the ability to drive an autonomous vehicle. But I think we can do it…” (41:29)
  • Practical Emergency: Carl gives an example where ride refusals endangered a family emergency.
    • Quote: “All I wanted, the ability… to go home to my mom and say, you’re okay and I love you.” (43:19 — Carl Richardson)

6. The Second Hearing: Accessibility Advocates Have Their Say

• Shifting the Conversation (47:50–54:47)
  • More Inclusive: The second Boston hearing features stronger representation from the disability community—thanks largely to Carl’s organizing.
    • “I felt the room had a… seismic shift.” (50:45 — Carl Richardson)
  • Arguments for AVs: Autonomous vehicles framed not just as tech or job threats, but as tools for independence and life-saving accessibility.
  • Skepticism and Accusations of ‘AstroTurfing’: Some on the city council, notably Councillor Mejia, express suspicion that AV companies are using disabled people as pawns.
    • Quote: “To utilize folks who are already vulnerable to fight on behalf those who have so much more than any of us here.” (55:27 — Julia Mejia)
  • Rebuttal: Carl: “I know that Waymo is aligning themselves. I’m not going to say using us, because… you can’t take advantage of me unless I want to be.” (53:39 — Carl Richardson)

7. The Stalemate and What True Compromise Would Require

• Councillor Zapata’s Reflections (59:11–62:18)
  • Call for Nuance: She notes both sides ignore important arguments—Waymo won’t fully engage with job loss, unions won’t engage fully with safety or accessibility.
    • Quote: “To get to a good answer, every single side would need to be challenged.” (62:18 — Gabriela Colette Zapata)
  • Need for Better Data: Calls for numbers—job losses, jobs created, crash/safety improvement projections—to inform real decision-making.
  • Political Reality: Passing an anti-Waymo ordinance without disability input is politically risky. The city council didn’t vote; the debate is now at the state level.

8. The Broader National Context & The Future

• Discussion with Reporter Timothy B. Lee (66:00–68:00)
  • Societal Tolerance: In the future, the idea of tolerating dangerous human drivers will wane as AVs become safer and more common.
  • Consumer Demand: Like the Uber revolution, consumer preference may ultimately override local resistance.
  • Need for New Compromises: Historical precedents exist (e.g., longshoremen and containerization), but no such compromise is evident yet for drivers.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “You didn’t come here to help us. You come here to kill this business. Okay, you knew, I knew.”
  — Abdi Aziz, on Uber’s arrival (04:02)
• “If you cannot beat them, join them.”
  — Abdi Aziz (06:14)
• “When Uber came, their aim was to kill taxi business. Now Waymo is to kill the drivers.”
  — Abdi Aziz (09:27)
• “Boston is a union town.”
  — Repeated refrain from multiple participants (15:14–15:25)
• “Do you know how many jobs I’ve turned down because I can’t get there?”
  — Carl Richardson, advocating for disabled people’s access (37:36)
• “I now believe someday… you don’t need to have eyesight to be able to have the ability to drive an autonomous vehicle.”
  — Carl Richardson (41:29)
• “All I wanted, the ability… to go home to my mom and say, you’re okay and I love you.”
  — Carl Richardson (43:19)
• “It was very, you know, scripted… I do believe that they are utilizing the disability community to their advantage. And you don’t do that to people. It’s wrong, period.”
  — Councillor Julia Mejia, skepticism over AV advocates (53:04)
• “You can’t take advantage of me unless I want to be. … If it means my mobility, my freedom, and my independence.”
  — Carl Richardson (53:39)
• “To get to a good answer, every single side would need to be challenged.”
  — Councillor Zapata (62:18)

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Important Timestamps and Segments

• [02:53] — Abdi Aziz’s introduction and the Uber takeover
• [09:13] — Introduction of Waymo threat
• [13:00] — Boston’s uniquely challenging roads and unionized political landscape
• [15:14–16:19] — Union testimonies and Boston’s “union town” refrain
• [35:15–44:41] — Carl Richardson’s testimony and disability advocacy
• [47:50–54:47] — The second hearing and the accessibility coalition shift
• [59:11–62:18] — Councillor Zapata’s reflections and the need for comprehensive policy
• [66:00–68:00] — Broader implications, societal change, and possible compromises

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Tone and Language

• The tone is candid, often personal, and mixes empathy with humor and skepticism.
• Speakers use direct and plainspoken language, especially when expressing frustration or sharing personal experiences.
• The adversarial and sometimes emotional tenor of the city council meetings contrasts with the more measured, analytical approach of some guests and the host.

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Conclusion: Who Loses, Who Wins, and What’s Next?

• Winners could include consumers (safer, cheaper rides) and people with disabilities (new independence).
• Losers may be traditional drivers and union workers, whose livelihoods are existentially threatened.
• No compromise has yet been found that adequately balances job loss with gains in safety and accessibility.
• Key insight: Real progress will require every stakeholder to confront uncomfortable trade-offs—and for policymakers to bridge, not ignore, competing visions of the future.

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This episode serves as a vivid microcosm of the society-wide challenges posed by powerful new technologies: who benefits, who pays the price, and how we might build a future that’s more than just a contest between “yes” and “no.”

Transcript

[Stephen Dubner]

Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Claude from Anthropic. Enjoy finding the hidden logic underneath things. Claude is built for that kind of thinking. It doesn't hand you a tidy answer and move on. It helps you work through the complexity, challenges your assumptions and surfaces what the data actually says. Deep research digs across dozens of sources so you can trace the reasoning yourself. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Freakonomics and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Shop [e-mail] freak upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 per month new custom for first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. Last week you heard part one of a two part series on the rise of driverless cars. It was made by our friends at the Search Engine Podcast which is hosted by PJ Vogt. If you've never listened to Search Engine before, I would suggest you also check out their episodes on Peptides Anthropic. You can find them on any podcast app. And now, here is part two of the Search Engine series on driverless cars. As always, thanks for listening.

[PJ Vogt]

Our first story was about a driver, a robot driver who evolved over many years at the nudging and training and machinations of a team of tech people in California. The second story I want to tell you also starts with the driver. A driver who is also going to evolve and change due to the machinations of some different west coast tech companies. The difference is that this driver is a human being. Chapter 1 Abdi Aziz I met Abdi Aziz in Boston where he's been a driver for many decades. He was doing it all the way back in the 90s. Back then he considered taxi driver to be a decent job, a career.

[Abdi Aziz]

Professionally. I've been driving for 30 years now.

[PJ Vogt]

30 years?

[Abdi Aziz]

Yes. I had a limo service for 10 years and then I was doing five years for a cab. A taxi.

[PJ Vogt]

And then one day in 2011, Abdaziz was hanging out at the airport with the other drivers when these men from the future showed up with a plan to change his life.

[Abdi Aziz]

When Uber came, I remember by 2011 they came to the airport. We were in the waiting area at the Logan, we have a designated parking lot where we wait the fares. So they come there and they say, hey, you know, we are introducing you in a company that will do same as a taxi, but it's an app. We want you guys to join with us and, you know, you can have your own car. We will give you a phone with the app and we can sign you up and you can make money. What did you think at the time? I say it is good, but you didn't come here to help us. You come here to kill this business. Okay, you knew, I knew.

[PJ Vogt]

Abdiaziz had not been born yesterday. Here's what he understood immediately. The taxi business he operated in up until now had worked as a kind of monopoly In Boston, like many American cities, you legally were not allowed to drive a cab without a taxi license. A medallion. New medallions were almost never issued. So assuming you could afford to buy or rent a medallion, the city itself would make your job stable by protecting you from competition. But Uber was about to kill that system. Uber drivers just drove without medallions. The company argued that since they were picking up passengers via this newfangled phone app, they didn't need them. Abdyaziz knew that this was going to kill the industry, at least as it currently existed. Taxi driver would still be a job, but medallion owning taxi driver would not be. A wave was coming. He knew what he had to do. And so he told his fellow taxi drivers his strategy for dealing with Uber, the company that had come to kill their industry.

[Abdi Aziz]

I tell them, listen, I'm going to join on them. I said, I see where they're going. I read a lot of articles about them. They start from San Francisco. They went to Chicago. I say they are expanding. So we can't stop this. We cannot stop Uber.

[PJ Vogt]

So Abdi Aziz found himself working for Uber. He says someone at the company handed him his new marching orders.

[Abdi Aziz]

We're going to give you a laptop. We're going to give you 200 phones each week. So we want you to give these phones to the drivers that you hire, but we want you to set it up. They need to bring their driver license, they need to bring their Social Security, and you sign them up. Everyone that you sign, you give the phone, you activate the phone, they're good to go.

[PJ Vogt]

So they were giving you 200 iPhones a week to give out.

[Abdi Aziz]

To give out? Yeah, to the drivers.

[PJ Vogt]

So it's crazy. It's like they're kind of. They're coming to kill your business.

[Abdi Aziz]

Exactly.

[PJ Vogt]

I knew I knew. I knew.

[Abdi Aziz]

But that's why I say, if you cannot beat them, Joy and them, you know, so I'm gonna join them.

[PJ Vogt]

Abdiaziz, a man who could glimpse the future clearly enough to adapt to it. He'd worked recruiting for Uber for a while. Then he'd be one of the first hundred Uber drivers in Boston. Signed up for Uber Black, the premium service got himself a very expensive car. At first, it was an even better job than the one they destroyed. Uber in those early days was pretty generous. But after a few years, Uber, Abdaziz says that started to change. In 2022, Uber began rolling out a big change to its platform. Instead of taking a set percentage of each fare, Uber started using an algorithm to offer its drivers variable rates based on what its system thought each driver would accept for a given ride. The drivers believed that Uber, once it stopped showing them its take, raised that take by a lot. Uber, who we contacted for the story, maintains that their take rate is still, quote, around 20% and that what's gone up actually are government taxes and fees. But Abdiaziz does not believe them, and most drivers I've talked to share his view. Abdiaziz's perspective is that once Uber and Lyft had leverage, they started using it against the drivers. The market was wide open. New drivers signed up every day. If you didn't like it, you could leave. To Abyaziz and his fellow drivers, this all felt like a bait and switch. They could quit, but many of them had car loans. What they actually wanted was for the companies to raise their pay closer to what it had been before. They wanted better pay. They wanted some other concessions. Some of the drivers started thinking about whether there might be some way to exercise power over the abs. They started talking about a union. And so Abdiaziz found himself once again a recruiter for a disruptive new organization.

[Abdi Aziz]

So when we started, we were like 400 drivers, and we joined the union.

[PJ Vogt]

So you were early. You were early on Uber. You were early in the union.

[Abdi Aziz]

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Because I've been in the industry for, you know, quite a while, you know, 30 years. I know what is going on. You know, it is my profession, you know, so. And the union, they, you know, they say, okay, call all the drivers, let us unite, and then we're gonna go to the state.

[PJ Vogt]

And did it feel a little bit like when Uber was having you sign people up and then the union's having you sign people up? Did it feel similar, like going around, like, explaining something to people Telling them what the benefits?

[Abdi Aziz]

Absolutely.

[Carl Richardson]

Absolutely.

[Abdi Aziz]

Exactly. Because you see a lot of drivers, they don't know nothing about union.

[PJ Vogt]

Things were looking promising. They got a big ballot initiative in front of Massachusetts voters that gave them the right to even try to unionize. They were collecting signatures. But then, during this still fledgling moment in their union drive, a different tech company appeared on the horizon. Do you remember the first time you heard about Waymo?

[Abdi Aziz]

The Waymo? The first time I heard was back in 2022. I heard in San Francisco that they are doing testing.

[PJ Vogt]

What did you think?

[Abdi Aziz]

I said, okay, I mean, I'm not against technology. You know, I welcome any technology, same as Uber when they come to business. But I knew where they're heading to. You see, when Uber came, their aim was to kill taxi business. Now way more is to kill the drivers.

[PJ Vogt]

How you understand a story, what you feel as you hear it, it's so much about where the teller chooses to start it. The driverless car in the story I'd heard had begun as a contest among academics who were not primarily driven by profit. Some of them had genuinely wanted to solve the problem of car accidents. Others thought that making a robot drive across a desert was just a very cool puzzle to put their minds to. Those experiments had been sharpened into a technological product inside the cushy bubble of an enormously wealthy tech company who now had sent mapping cars to Abdieaziz's city, the first step to deployment there. When Uber had come to town, Abdyaziz had thought, if you can't beat him, join him. Now Waymo is here. And he saw no way to join them, so he had to find a way to beat them. Fortunately for Abdieaziz, he's in Boston. For the record, my name is Sharon Durkin, District 8 city councilor, and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Planning, Development and Transportation. Chapter two, Union Town. Boston City councilors began meeting last summer to discuss preemptively banning Waymo from their city. The first meeting took place in July inside Boston City Hall, a room resplendent in many hues of municipal brown. The stated agenda for the hearing, docket 1141, sounded neutral to the point of boring. Order for a hearing to evaluate autonomous vehicle operations in the city of Boston. The goals for today's hearing is to gather information, hear from stakeholders, and better understand the regulatory landscape we must explore. Despite this very dry description, what was actually going to happen would be significantly more raucous. These hearings started out with the flavor and intensity of a political Rally people wanted to find a way to stop these cars and this would be the room where they laid out the case as to why it'd be the beginning of the fight. Some version of this fight has been happening with increasing frequency in American cities. Not all cities, blue cities. There's this pattern actually observed by reporter Timothy B. Lee, which is that cities in red and purple states like Austin and Phoenix mostly welcome Waymo, Whereas places like D.C. and New York fight it. In cities that fight Waymo, the conversation is less about safety and much more about whether robo taxis will take away jobs. My hope was if I paid attention to Boston, maybe what was beginning here as just a fight would evolve into politicians starting to think through some kind of compromise. I think these kinds of compromises, finding solutions for workers who AI could displace they are probably one of the most important challenges for our politicians today. And so Boston for me was a test case. Are we capable? Were our politics ready? So here's how things began. Bostonians were here today to talk about something, jobs. But they started with the one thing everybody could probably agree on. Boston's streets, the battleground here, were barely fit for human driving, let alone Waymo. Boston is one of the oldest major cities in the country with narrow one way streets, alleys and the lack of a traditional grid system.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

It's really, really difficult to drive.

[Stephen Dubner]

You look at the map, it looks like a child's drawing.

[PJ Vogt]

You know, we also have issues with double parked cars, ride shares, delivery vehicles. After lambasting Boston streets a while longer, the people here get to the issue that'll actually dominate these jobs in particular union jobs. We need to address potential layoffs for our union drivers with the introduction of self driving cars. I think it's important that you know, we listen when we hear teamsters in

[Julia Mejia]

the Carmen union, SEIU and countless residents

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

who feel blindsided by this.

[PJ Vogt]

The App Drivers union, Abdi Aziz's union. We're the stars of the hearing today.

[Carl Richardson]

I'm a proud member of ADU at

[PJ Vogt]

drivers union and I'm here to ask you to protect our local jobs.

[Stephen Dubner]

Rideshare drivers just won the right to

[Matt Walsh]

unionize and to fight for better wages and conditions.

[Julia Mejia]

Robot cars threaten all of this progress

[PJ Vogt]

Abdi Aziz would show up to at a later hearing.

[Abdi Aziz]

I understand it is business, it is capitalism, but not in my city at the expense of our jobs. Thank you.

[PJ Vogt]

The app drivers were not officially a union yet. Technically they were still in the process of forming. But the threat from Waymo seemed so dire that this larger coalition had been created that included a bunch of historic unions. It was called Labor United Against Waymo. Every driver's union in Boston uniting to try to kill Waymo. Here at the tip of the spear, the Teamsters. Nationally, Teamsters are the largest union of drivers in America. 1.4 million members. Boston's one of their biggest strongholds. This is the union that started out as workers driving teams of horses, but evolved to represent workers who drive cars and trucks, and these days, represents lots and lots of blue collar union jobs. Boston's a union town. Everybody said this to me over and over in the same quick, matter of fact way that people where I'm from say New York's expensive. The way you toss off a truth so obvious it's barely worth repeating, but which you have to repeat all the time because it informs everything. Always. The Teamsters and the politicians just kept repeating it. Boston's a union town.

[Stephen Dubner]

Boston is a union town.

[Matt Walsh]

And you hear the city.

[PJ Vogt]

We're a proud union city. We're proud of our workers. We're proud of. Boston is a union town. We're not any of those other cities.

[Carl Richardson]

So union city here in the city

[PJ Vogt]

of Boston, we want to protect. And watching the hearings, I could see part of what was so beautiful about Boston being a union town as driver after driver testified about their jobs. There's just something moving to me anyway, about watching people talk about the dignity and importance of human work. A few days ago, while on my route, I spotted a man collapse on the ground. He was unconscious and unresponsive, and it became clear that he had overdosed. I stayed with him, flagged down a homeowner who called 911. When the first responder arrived, they administered Narcan. Had I not seen him and acted quickly, he may have died. To me, a person to waymu, an obstacle to avoid. You had union members who drove UPS trucks, ambulances. And while these Teamsters were not immediately under threat from Waymo's Robo Taxi Service, they knew that driverless technology was not going to stop there. We see the writing on the wall.

[Stephen Dubner]

We know that driverless car and truck companies are salivating at the idea that they could eliminate Teamster jobs.

[PJ Vogt]

Nationally, the Teamsters actually sat out the last presidential race. But in Boston, the Teamsters are still welded to the Democrats, and the Democrats are welded to them. Just a few months ago, I was knocking doors with drivers across the city to give them the right to organize. You guys just were able to unionize, and this would just be a huge blow to you all as the city councilors began to ask union leaders questions. You got the sense that councilors already knew some of these answers, that maybe they were asking more just to get the answers on the public record.

[Julia Mejia]

And I'm just curious, can you talk to us a little bit about the number of conversations that you've had with Waymo? How many times did you meet with them?

[PJ Vogt]

This is city councilor Julia Mejia asking one of the teamsters leaders, how many times did Waymo reach out to you before they sent mapping cars to Boston? Very quick, thank you for the question, councilor Mejia. It rhymes with hero.

[Julia Mejia]

0.

[Stephen Dubner]

0.

[Julia Mejia]

So this is why I asked the question. Because oftentimes things are being done to us without us. Right. And so I'm curious what words of advice, Counselor Mejia, now that you have the mic.

[PJ Vogt]

The counselor had arrived an hour late to the hearing. A former MTV reporter, she's noticeably hipper than the median municipal politician. Standing out in the beige sea of the city council room. She'd come to listen to the heroes, the drivers. But more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains, Waymo's executives.

[Julia Mejia]

If, if we're competing with machines, it will ultimately have an impact on our drivers.

[Matt Walsh]

At this point, given the sense, the sale, the scale of our fleet compared to Uber and Lyft, I can't speak to what the decrease in their revenue has been. I don't know those numbers.

[PJ Vogt]

I can tell you the person on the receiving end of these questions is Matt Walsh, Waymah's regional head of state and local public policy. Walsh looks the part of the tech exec. A spiffy suit, a swoopy coif of silver hair. For most of their conversation, they're talking past each other because Matt Walsh wants to discuss safety and councillor Mejia wants to discuss drivers jobs.

[Julia Mejia]

What we are doing is creating an opportunity for people to choose to not support humans and the workforce. That is the choice that we're giving people.

[Matt Walsh]

I would disagree, counselor. I would say the choice we're giving people is they can make a decision if they want to be in a safer vehicle that they feel safer in and that meets the needs.

[Julia Mejia]

And so are we saying that our Uber and Lyft drivers and our app drivers are not safe drivers?

[Matt Walsh]

I am not making comments specifically about the safety of urban Lyft. What I can say is that over. After 70, 71 million miles of fully autonomous operations on U. S roads, we know that we are five times less in injury causing crashes than human Drivers. I am not suggesting that Uber and Lyft drivers are dangerous. I am suggesting that human drivers compared to the Waymo driver are involved in.

[Julia Mejia]

But Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot. So let's, let's, let's, let's.

[Matt Walsh]

Without it. You're totally correct.

[Julia Mejia]

Be really clear about what it is. It's an apparatus.

[Matt Walsh]

We refer when we say Waymo driver. I know the chair brought this up earlier. We, that is the, what we call the way. That is what we call the technology. And I understand it has sensitivities and

[Julia Mejia]

we, it's very triggering.

[Matt Walsh]

Understood and heard loud and clear.

[Julia Mejia]

Want to make sure that we, we're, we're, we're not driving there. That's not happening. So right now in supermarkets they do these self check. So Boston is like a little character. You know, I think that people, it could have been, you know, CEOs versus bees. Boston would just be like, we're on the B side, you know, like we're going to go hard for honey, you know, like we're crazy like that.

[PJ Vogt]

I got to talk to Councillor Mejia, the politician who'd been so offended by Waymo's use of the D word. We met in person in her office in Dorchester. The counselor was giving me and producer Emily Moltair a quick lesson on Boston, this foreign country where I'd happily landed.

[Julia Mejia]

We are just not the type of city that just goes along to get along with certain things that we feel especially like Boston is a union town. We're hardcore. We don't. We're adverse to outsiders. It's a city, but it's like a little old town, you know, it's like very towny here.

[PJ Vogt]

Well, this gets to what I want to ask you about, which is Waymo, like when do you recall the first time Waymo, even as a concept, showed up on your radar?

[Julia Mejia]

Yeah, right before the hearing. Like, I didn't know. Like, first of all, I'm not one of those people. I don't pay attention to everything. I'm not gonna, you know, like I have my own little bubble here. You know, I'm dealing with education issues, potholes, like murder, you know, like real life issues that impact the quality of life of my constituents. And so it wasn't until recently when there was some rumblings of Waymo wanting to set up shop here in Boston, that I had learned that they were in other cities. I was like, damn, there are people who like this. Like I got in a way more car, like all excited about. I'm like, wow, people like this. So I was.

[PJ Vogt]

You start searching about because you're curious. And then the algorithm starts being like, just videos of like happy people in driverless cars.

[Julia Mejia]

I'm like, oh, wow. Who are these people? Really excited getting driven around by a robot or just not even a robot. Some of these don't even have a little head. They're just like, yeah, it's just a steering wheel. Yeah, that's even creepier. So that was like, ew. Yeah, no.

[PJ Vogt]

I've talked to a few people who feel this way when they see videos of Waymos. Part of this is a quirk of design. There are other models of driverless cars that were fully designed to be driverless, like Amazon Zoox. Those cars don't have a steering wheel, but Waymo retrofits pre existing Jaguar SUVs. And so when you get in one, there's still a steering wheel as a passenger. You watch it turn itself as if guided by an invisible pair of hands. Watching that wheel turn, some people feel wonder, like they're seeing the work of a very impressive engineer. Others feel outrage, like they're watching the space where a human used to be should still be. That's Julia's perspective. When Julia was five, she and her mom moved to Boston from the Dominican Republic. Her mother was undocumented for most of her childhood. She cleaned offices for a living. Julia talks about her mom a lot. How from her mom she inherited an understanding of her mission to protect working people's jobs.

[Julia Mejia]

I used to work at McDonald's. I used to clean offices with my mom. I did all of that. Those were low entry jobs that I could get. And I saw that with the self checkout in the supermarkets, right. Those jobs were occupied oftentimes by people who are retired or high school students or young people with disabilities. Right? And now those jobs are being replaced by a self checkout. And there's a sense of, for me, it's a moral issue too, right. That should be at the center of the AI conversation. Is that morally, while it's exciting and we could do all of this and we could save lots of money, but what is the unintended consequence of that? Right.

[PJ Vogt]

When you look at it now, like, do you.

[Julia Mejia]

I yell at people too. Really get out of the line. What you doing there? You know, that's somebody's job that you just took the like, lady, get out my face. I'm like, yes, but nah, man. Like it's, you know, I'm at the moral police, but I just feel like we are not thinking about other people. We're often just thinking about ourselves. And what is the quickest way to get out?

[PJ Vogt]

To Councillor Mejia, the headline of the day, really the only story, was low wage workers. In the hearing, she asked the Waymo executive about the precedent that was worrying her. Those self checkout machines.

[Julia Mejia]

So right now in supermarkets they do these self checkouts.

[Matt Walsh]

Correct?

[Julia Mejia]

Right. And those are taking jobs from people. And it seems like there is a trend here. And my biggest concern as someone who had to have two to three jobs growing up just to make ends meet, is that what we are doing is creating financial hardships for people who are already struggling. And so I'm just curious, how are you reconciling with that impact that you're making on already low wage workers?

[Matt Walsh]

As I said earlier to the other counselor's question, we are committed to increasing workforce developments and job opportunities with the industry.

[Julia Mejia]

How about for the drivers? How are you increasing workforce development opportunities for the drivers? Not for people who develop apps, not for people who answer phones. For people who are drivers. Like, tell me about what that looks like.

[Matt Walsh]

We do not have workforce efforts that are specifically aimed at any part of the population we have. We are creating jobs for individuals that want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry. If drivers that

[PJ Vogt]

how you understand a story in part has to do with who you hear it from. For months, I'd been listening to the engineers who first dreamed up these driverless cars. From their perspective, they'd only ever really had one question. Could they build a car that drove itself more safely than humans could? Waymo believed the answer was now yes. But Boston had a different question. What about jobs? I did speak to Waymo's Northeast policy manager, Anthony Perez, who said he didn't want to be disingenuous. He expected over time there'd be what he called transition for app drivers, but that it wasn't a one to one displacement. He said Waymo would also create jobs. Cleaning the cars, maintaining the sensors, repairing the vehicles. The estimate he pointed me to said every five robo taxis might create one job. But he was also careful to say that it was just very hard to predict the future. Different cities would be different. He wasn't trying to be evasive, he explained. He was trying to be honest about real uncertainty. But in the hearing that day, as Councillor Mejia pressed Waymo's Matt Walsh to describe exactly what jobs his company could provide the existing Uber and Lyft drivers, Matt Walsh came up short.

[Matt Walsh]

If drivers that currently work for Uber or Lyft should decide that they want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry. There will be opportunities for them to do so.

[Julia Mejia]

And what would their job title be?

[Matt Walsh]

I'm not gonna sit here and sort to speculate what their job opportunities would be.

[Julia Mejia]

Let's just come to terms with the fact that we are creating a hostile environment for our hard working people who are no longer gonna have work.

[Matt Walsh]

I appreciate the question.

[Julia Mejia]

I forget the guy's name, but he just felt a little bit arrogant. And I felt like, you know what? Even after everybody spoke, there should have been a little bit more humility and humanity in his understanding of why people were so adverse to the idea of losing their jobs. Like, he could have won me over a little bit if he gave me a little bit more heart, and he didn't.

[PJ Vogt]

You really think he could have won you over?

[Julia Mejia]

No, I'm just joking. No, nobody could win me over.

[PJ Vogt]

Part of the issue. Matt Walsh was an outsider. Worse, an outsider from a tech company worth $126 billion. The logic of Boston politics said that nobody in this room had to listen to him. He was here in his role as a well compensated pinata. I understood that at the same time, if Waymo was right, if its driver was 80% safer than a human one, that meant there would be preventable car accidents in Boston in the years to come. Accidents caused by human drivers making human mistakes. We lose our tempers, we check our phones, we think about other things while driving. We don't mean to, but we do. And sometimes that means we hurt other people. The people we hurt would not be voting in the Democratic primary a week after this hearing. But I thought they deserved to have more of a place in the conversation than they'd had so far. Emily Maltaire, my colleague who'd been observing the interview in Councilor Mejia's office. At one point she chimed in, I

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

feel like for me, in learning about this technology, I was very skeptical about the safety of it. And I mean, I've known people who have died in car crashes. I know someone who died in the backseat of an Uber. I don't think it was the Uber driver's fault, but I feel like as I learned more about the technology, I did take seriously the idea that there could be something safer about Waymo technology. Is that something that you're curious about?

[Julia Mejia]

No, I'm not curious about that in any kind of way. Because when I think about safety, and let's just give you the example of the car accident, I don't see someone instinctually coming out of the car to get someone out. Like if it was a Waymo robot or that's not even a robot, it's just a wheel. Who would be there to help support the consumer? Who? What? How so I don't think the safety concern is a good compelling argument for me.

[PJ Vogt]

For you, it's like I don't think there's anything they would show you where you would think you just trust humans more.

[Julia Mejia]

I would hope the world would trust humans more.

[PJ Vogt]

Councillor Mejia told us when she left that first hearing, she was pretty sure her side had won the unions, the app drivers had made their case against the robots. The Waymo executives had clearly been outmatched. The thing was, though, Councillor Mejia had missed something. There'd been one person, person whose testimony she just hadn't heard. Someone who would speak for two brief minutes and who would begin to change the entire conversation in Boston, after a short break. Carl.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio and you are listening to a special episode of the podcast search Engine. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Cigna Healthcare. For many men, mental health challenges aren't recognized until they've already taken a toll. Work pressure, financial stress, changing relationships, and traditional expectations around masculinity can quietly wear men down, often without clear warning signs. In season three of the Visibility Gap, Dr. Guy Winch and his guests explore how these pressures show up, how to spot them earlier, and how men can access meaningful support. Listen to the new season of the Visibility Gap, a podcast presented by Cigna Healthcare. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Hotels.com make your next work trip work for you. Hotels.com's new save your Way feature lets you choose between instant savings now or banking rewards for later. It's a flexible rewards program that puts you in control with no confusing math or blackout dates. Book now at hotels.com Save youe Way is available to loyalty members in the US and UK on hotels with member prices. Other terms apply. See site for details. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Amica Insurance. When it comes to taking care of their customers, Amica goes the extra mile from listening to your insurance needs to following up after a claim. Amica provides coverage with empathy because as a mutual insurer, Amica is built for for its customers and prioritizes you. It's the way insurance should be, Amica where you are priority number one. Visit amica.com and get a quote today. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner and we are back with our friends from Search Engine. Here is host PJ Vogt.

[PJ Vogt]

Welcome back to the show. Emily and I had been in Boston a couple days now. The cold snap here was at a level I found frankly offensive. I dressed wrong for it and was getting those full body jitterbug shivers vibrating down the sidewalk when we'd go outside. Very cold. It's the cold you feel in your teeth.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

I'm wearing long underwear.

[PJ Vogt]

Maybe that's your thing. I'm wearing short underwear. Exactly. As much as I was suffering, Emily Maltaire was thriving. Emily, a devoted public transportation nerd, she actually worked for a time in Boston's transit agency. Emily was just happy to be here. A mental tropical vacation. She kept cheerfully suggesting we ride the T to get to our interviews and harassing me with Boston transit facts.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

Did you know the bus in Boston is only $1.70?

[PJ Vogt]

That's amazing.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

Yeah, I was working for the T when the did fair raises and my one of my personal transit heroes, Laurel Paget Seakins, fought really hard to keep the bus fares low.

[PJ Vogt]

What were they at before the raises? Well, the I would cower in the warm alcoves of whatever local business would let me, then hustle into Ubers whenever possible, insisting that taking cabs here was not a luxury or a weakness. It was in fact important research. That's what the story was about. It was a joke. But it wasn't. I did want to talk to as many drivers as I could while I was in Boston. I'd end up interviewing 8. 4 at the union's office and a random sample of four out in the world. Nearly all the drivers described the job as having recently gotten harder, just like Abdyaziz had. They were working more hours for less money. But the union and non union workers differed in some important ways. The non union drivers didn't really have Waymo on their radar, and they were unlikely to think of driving as a long term career. This matches the data we have. A 2018 study found that the average Uber driver drives for three months. It's a lot of people's first job in our country, the latter to their next one. So the union drivers were pretty unusual just by dint of the fact that they'd made a career out of this. Those were the things I learned in the cabs I could persuade Emily to take and in the studies I read about those cabs. This Tuesday, however, we were walking the Boston wind playfully tearing the skin from my bones. Our mission that morning was to meet a man named Carl Richardson for an interview that was thankfully indoors. He met us in the lobby. We'd never met in person before, but I recognized him when I saw him.

[Carl Richardson]

Hi, how are you? Emily.

[Julia Mejia]

Nice to meet you.

[PJ Vogt]

Hi, Carl. P.J.

[Carl Richardson]

p.J. How are you?

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

Good.

[Carl Richardson]

How are you? Good, good. Come on, buddy, let's go.

[PJ Vogt]

Carl has significant hearing loss. He wears two hearing aids. He's also almost completely blind. He has a yellow Labrador with him at all times. That's his guide dog, Dayton. Carl had shown up in these hearings as a private citizen to argue in favor of autonomous vehicles. Like Counselor Julie Mejia, he'd been outraged by what he encountered, but for entirely different reasons. Chapter three, the Right to Autonomy. Carl told me the story of the day as he'd experienced it.

[Carl Richardson]

First of all, when I walked across City Hall Plaza, you can hear protests and rallies, union protests and rallies, the

[Julia Mejia]

driverless cars and, yes, the human beings.

[PJ Vogt]

Union power.

[Julia Mejia]

Union power. When I say justice.

[Carl Richardson]

Then I walked in and I got there about an hour early on purpose so I could sign on a piece of paper. And I had my intern with me. She said I was number three on the list, so I was hoping to go early. We got there, I think they were probably. Let's see, the food and restaurant union was there. The App driver's union was there. The SEIU union was there. The Teamster union was there. I remember the ambulance driver union being there. So the disability community was far outnumbered. And I will even tell you that a handful of disabled people left. They were so discouraged, based on what they were hearing, they didn't even want to testify.

[PJ Vogt]

Why? What did they find specifically discouraging?

[Carl Richardson]

I think that they felt like the city councilors had already made up their mind, and I think they heard anger in the room. So some of the people didn't stay. I felt outnumbered, but I still felt like I had an important story to tell.

[PJ Vogt]

Carl, in the room that day, kept waiting to speak. He had expected that because of his early signup, he'd be one of the first speakers. Instead, he waited nearly the entire four hours. For some reason, they'd slotted him almost at the very end. Carl Richardson. You have two minutes. Nice to see you.

[Carl Richardson]

Yes. Hi, my name is Carl Richardson. I am the Massachusetts State Health AVA coordinator and also an advisory board member for mayor.

[PJ Vogt]

You see, Carl, he's wearing a light blue button up and a tie.

[Carl Richardson]

We've heard a lot about the impact on the union and the drivers and the workforce. Let's talk about the communities. I think it would impact in favor of not only people with physical disabilities like myself, but people with mental. And by the time I testified, I threw out my written, prepared remarks, and I just winged it. We keep talking about employment. I want to have that discussion. Do you know how many jobs I've turned down because I can't get there? Or how many interviews?

[PJ Vogt]

If you spend time talking to Carl, you learn a lot about unemployment in the disability community. It's high. Their unemployment rate is twice as high as the rest of the workforce. One contributing factor to that number that a lot of people don't think about is just transportation. You can't do a job if you can't reliably get to it.

[Carl Richardson]

I agree that Uber drivers and Paratramp do an amazing job, but not always. At least once a week, I get denied access to Uber and Lyft because they refuse to take me because I have a service dog and denying me my civil rights. I often get denied access, too, because they won't go beyond the city limit because they're worried about maximizing their revenue in the ability to pick up a return fare. My life is not limited to the city limit. And the other thing it would do, it would increase.

[PJ Vogt]

There's actually been pretty well documented issues with discrimination by Uber drivers against disabled people. There's an active DOJ lawsuit about it right now. Wheelchair users whose rides are canceled because it would take extra time to help them load in. Blind people whose rides are canceled once the drivers see a service dog. A spokesperson at Uber said they have a zero tolerance policy for confirmed service denials and that Uber fundamentally disagrees with the DOJ's allegations. In the meantime, Carl says he spends a lot of time trying to strategize ways to stop Uber drivers from passing him by. Carl was born with a genetic condition called usher syndrome, type 2. It meant he was destined to lose his vision and hearing, but gradually and as an adult. It's a difficult diagnosis, in part because psychologically, it requires you to accept so much, to accept loss, knowing that more loss is just ahead, that whatever you get used to, you'll need to get used to more. There was a time in Carl's adult life, for instance, when he had a driver's license.

[Carl Richardson]

So I drove. I had 2020 vision up until I was about 30, which is one of the reasons why autonomous vehicles are a big deal to me, because I want that feeling that I used to have when I drove of freedom and independence and mobility. I know what I've lost, you know, so. And I want that back. So people. But it's not. People deal with it differently.

[Abdi Aziz]

Yeah.

[Carl Richardson]

And I have a sister who has it. She never took up driving because she knew she was gonna have to give that up someday, and she didn't want to have her heart broken. I said, screw it. I'm gonna drive. I'm gonna work in film and television. I'm gonna do everything I can.

[PJ Vogt]

What type of car did you drive?

[Carl Richardson]

Well, whatever I hadn't totaled. I drove, what, 10, 12 years. I think I totaled five cars because I remember I was slowly going blind. But I was in denial. So I'm lucky to be alive and sitting here with you today.

[PJ Vogt]

It was hard to let go of driving.

[Carl Richardson]

Yeah. But what finally happened is I sat behind the wheel of a car one day, get him ready to go to

[Julia Mejia]

work,

[Carl Richardson]

and I actually said to myself, am I going to get to work alive today? And I sat there and I couldn't answer it, so I called out sick, and I never drove again.

[PJ Vogt]

It's a hard thing to give up.

[Carl Richardson]

Yeah. And I want it back. And I never thought I'd get it back. But I now believe someday, within my lifetime, we might have to convince the politicians you don't need to have eyesight to be able to have the ability to drive an autonomous vehicle. But I think we can do it, because it isn't just about blind people. Everybody has a mother they have to take away their driving from. Everybody has a father where they say, dad, I don't know if you should drive anymore. Everybody has a teenager who's texting on their phone. See, we're not even going to beginning to think about the possibilities of what autonomous vehicles could do. The other reason I don't want to ban autonomous vehicles in the city of Boston is because I think eventually it'll lead to personal ownership.

[PJ Vogt]

And is that what you really want?

[Carl Richardson]

Oh, you bet. I'm not kidding when I say I have a savings account where I put aside a few hundred bucks a month just for the ability for me to buy an autonomous vehicle someday. And if they ban autonomous vehicles, then they're going to ban me from the right to drive, earn a living, go to school, go to medical appointment, go to the beach on a Sunday, go visit my mom in the nursing home, whatever. With the flexibility that everybody else has.

[PJ Vogt]

Carl wanted me to know that even though Waymo had become the subject of this fight, he did not care if Waymo specifically came to Boston. Any autonomous car company would do. He just wanted to be able to hail a taxi that couldn't pass him by. And he wanted one day to own a car again. In the hearing, near the end of his allotted time, he told a Story about something that had happened to him recently, an emergency when he needed a ride.

[Carl Richardson]

Imagine that you're blind and your mother called you at 7 o' clock on a Sunday night and said, I just heard from the sheriff's department. I'm going to get arrested unless I come up with some money. Right away she got a call. She believed it. I'm the primary caregiver in my family. I had to figure out a way to get out there and I got denied three times in a row while I was trying to get out. To my mother, public transportation was an option because it was late on a Sunday night. All I wanted, the ability wants to be able to go home to my mom and say, you're okay and I love you. And that would be the positive impact of autonomous vehicles. So, yeah, definitely think about the human component and the people component. But think about it for the whole community at large, not just the union. Thank you.

[PJ Vogt]

Thank you so much. Carla, how do you think the politicians in the room saw you?

[Carl Richardson]

Well, I don't think they were there to hear my speech. The only one that was there to hear was the chair of their hearing testimony.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

So

[PJ Vogt]

I'm here alone now. So I think it's time to adjourn the hearing. All the other city councilors had left before Carl's testimony. Many of them had announced in the hearing that they had to go attend a different Teamsters event. A strike by the sanitation workers. Boston's a Union Town. Docket 1141 is adjourned.

[Carl Richardson]

that hearing, I didn't feel like the disability voice or perspective was heard. And it was then that I decided I was going to go back and bring even more people with me to the second hearing.

[PJ Vogt]

The second hearing. In July, two city councilors had unveiled a fairly bold anti Waymo ordinance. The ordinance decreed that every any driverless car in Boston had to have a human driver in the driver's seat at all times and called for a feasibility study of the tech, which would include organized labor, but not the disability community. If passed functionally, this would be a ban. The plan was to vote on the ordinance after the second hearing, which would take place in October. The driverless car in Boston was on trial. This after a short break.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio. You are listening to part two of a series on driverless cars from our friends at the podcast search engine.

[PJ Vogt]

We'll be right back.

[Stephen Dubner]

Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Adobe Acrobat. You need to make a huge presentation in an hour. Luckily, Adobe Acrobat uses AI to take all your documents and generate a presentation in a few clicks, building slides faster than ever before. So if you need a last minute pitch deck, do that with Acrobat. Need to level up your presentation design? Do that with acrobat. You have 30 plus documents that need to be simplified into a proposal. Do that, do that do that with Acrobat. Learn [e-mail] do that with Acrobat. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by USPS in business, there's no room for guesswork. Every shipment matters. Every deadline counts. That's why reliability is at the core of USPS Ground Advantage. Each package moves through a secure nationwide network tracked from dock to door with affordable upfront pricing and delivery you can depend on because knowing your logistics are handled lets you find focus on everything else. Visit usps.comground advantage to start shipping with confidence. USPS Ground Advantage We Mean business

[Julia Mejia]

A

[PJ Vogt]

rich life isn't a straight line to

[Julia Mejia]

a destination on the horizon.

[PJ Vogt]

Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn with

[Julia Mejia]

detours, new possibilities, and even another passenger or three.

[PJ Vogt]

And with 100 years of navigating ups and downs, you can count on Edward Jones to help guide you through it all.

[Julia Mejia]

Because life is a winding path made

[PJ Vogt]

rich by the people you walk it with. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones Member, SIPC

[Stephen Dubner]

hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and here again is the host of the search engine podcast PJ Vote.

[PJ Vogt]

Welcome back to the show and to a crisp late October day in Boston.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

For the record, my name is Gabriela Colette Zapata, District 1 city councillor, and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Government operations. Today is October 28, 2022.

[PJ Vogt]

Chapter four a good fight. The second hearing would go differently. It would go differently from the beginning. One reason was because of its referee, Presiding Councillor Gabriella Coletta Zapata, who started by trying to establish some ground rules.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

There will be no demonstration of approval or disapproval or signs. So thank you so much for your understanding. We appreciate you. Again, thank you so much for being here.

[PJ Vogt]

The union went first. A string of testimonies from all sorts of drivers, many familiar faces from the previous hearing. And of course, Councillor Julia Mejia was here, dressed today in a jaunty black beret and black glasses.

[Julia Mejia]

I'm still in shock that I have to even have this conversation, that here we are in this day and age, trying to defend ourselves from robots taking over our jobs, right? And right here, this is the first line of defense. Because first they come for the poor jobs Right. First, you know, I'm always ready for a good fight. So I walked in ready. I'm like, this is one, two, punch. I'm going to take them all out this time. You know,

[PJ Vogt]

Councilor Mejia in Spanish says they start by attacking the poorest, but from there they keep picking us off, that the city of Boston is not going to let anyone take away the income of its people.

[Carl Richardson]

The chair of that he honor made it very clear. We're going to listen to everybody. We're going to take it in the order of testimony. Everybody's going to get three minutes. There are going to be no outbursts. They control the hearing much better.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

And your contributions, we're going to transition because we do have a long list to public testimony. So thank you. Thank you so much.

[PJ Vogt]

After the union had spoken, everyone else who put their names on the list got their chance to talk.

[Carl Richardson]

So in closing, if you do do a study, look at not only how it would negatively impact people, but look how it would positively impact people. Because to me, autonomous vehicles is not a dystopian future. There's a second side of the story. It's a legitimate side of the story. And I felt like I wasn't going to be alone because I had a lot of people with disabilities in the room with me that day.

[PJ Vogt]

There must be more accessible, affordable, and reliable transportation. Carl had done his version of what the unions had done so well. In the first round, he summoned his own coalition. Hello, my name is Steven Yardi. These were people from Best Buddies, an organization for people with intellectual disabilities. They were citizens from Boston Blind Community.

[Julia Mejia]

As a legally blind guide dog user in Boston, I have fewer transportation options

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

than I did 10 years ago.

[PJ Vogt]

I came from New Hampshire and what I used to call transportation desert, where I only had to rely on my

[Carl Richardson]

family to help me get back and

[PJ Vogt]

forth to be able to.

[Carl Richardson]

I felt the room had a. Almost what I would call a seismic shift.

[PJ Vogt]

Autonomous vehicles have the potential to give me and other people with disabilities increased independence, mobility, and flexibility. I think we can go where the right can't go.

[Carl Richardson]

There was even a mother against drunk driving who spoke on one of the panels. Right.

[Julia Mejia]

Autonomous vehicles represent another important tool in the effort to eliminate impaired driving. We welcome Waymo.

[Carl Richardson]

I mean, what are you going to say to her mother? You don't have a right to want autonomous vehicles since your son died.

[PJ Vogt]

Mad value. What were you just like feeling watching them talk?

[Julia Mejia]

So, you know, to be honest with you, at first I didn't know what I was walking into, like, to Be honest, like, I thought I was going to get more of the last go round, but the second hearing, they were more strategic. And when I started hearing from some of the disability community members, you know, I also felt like some. It was very, you know, scripted. And I haven't worked in this space, understand how you set up all of your advocates to all be on the same message. So I felt like they're all saying the same thing. I've seen this action. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I want to first start off by thanking the public testimony. I think to my colleague's earlier point is.

[PJ Vogt]

So Councilor Mejia, who says what she thinks, told the room that what she thought she'd just seen was a show, a show put on by Waymo, benefit

[Julia Mejia]

from that are not the people that we're trying to serve or the people that we're trying to protect. So I just want to name that. That was very poor taste, in my personal, humble opinion. While I think it's important for us to get that on the record, I think what it did is provide.

[PJ Vogt]

I think the words you used in the hearing is that you said you felt like it was in poor taste.

[Julia Mejia]

Well, I really did say poor taste. I did. Oh, my God. Everybody needs therapy after they get done with my hearings. Lord have mercy. So, yeah, I do believe that they are utilizing the disability community to their advantage. And you don't do that to people. It's wrong, period.

[PJ Vogt]

I don't know how to ask this question. It's slightly delicate, but also, go for it.

[Carl Richardson]

If I don't want to answer it,

[PJ Vogt]

I'll figure it out. I'm not worried about it. Waymo is not an accessibility company. It's not as if they're inventing autonomous vehicles for accessibility reasons. They want to reach a large market. Accessibility is part of it. It's also the fact of the accessibility issue and the fact of disabled people as allies for them is convenient, sure,

[Carl Richardson]

but so is AARP when they push certain things right, and they have elderly spokespersons. And yes, it's convenient that the two things align together. And I hear you, and maybe that's a little selfish for Waymo, but I'm going into this knowing what I'm getting into. I know that Waymo is aligning themselves. I'm not going to say using us, because I'm not. If you listen to me talk, you can't take advantage of me unless I want to be right. So I know what I'm getting into when I present on behalf of autonomous vehicles. I don't Care if they make a profit if it means my mobility, my freedom, and my independence. Okay. Is way more reaching out to the blind community? Yes. Are they perhaps giving donations to the American Council for the Blind? Yes, but the individuals aren't making a dime. The money's going to nonprofit organization. So did that answer your question?

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, and I don't. It's like, I personally, I feel like it's just. It's a question.

[Carl Richardson]

I feel like I'm being used, if that's what you're getting at. They never said how to testify. They never once told me what to say. They just said, please testify on behalf of autonomous vehicles. That's all. That's it. Nobody held my hands. Nobody gave me coaching. And to my knowledge, the handful of people that I recruited that testified, none of them got coaching either.

[PJ Vogt]

So that's Carl's position. Councillor Mejia, though, in the room that day was very fired up, very focused on the target of her ire.

[Julia Mejia]

So I just want to name that. That was very poor taste. To utilize folks who are already vulnerable to fight on behalf those who have so much more than any of us here.

[PJ Vogt]

She directed some very strong words at the man sitting across from her, the man in a suit with gray hair.

[Julia Mejia]

Waymo. And I'll start with the CEO, maybe. How can we utilize Waymo instead of replacing our app drivers to improve the quality of experiences? For those folks who have complained, I

[Carl Richardson]

think utilizing Waymo in an autonomous vehicle opens the door for elimination of practices, illegal practices of discrimination.

[Julia Mejia]

No, that's not the question that. The question is right, because you talk about your technology and your ability.

[PJ Vogt]

Councillor Mejia pressed. She wanted him to answer. How could Waymo create new technology that would improve life for blind people without using driverless cars, drivers.

[Julia Mejia]

That's the question that.

[PJ Vogt]

I'm not that technology advanced.

[Julia Mejia]

But you're the CEO of a technology company. Company that's going to be.

[Carl Richardson]

No, I'm the president CEO of the

[PJ Vogt]

Carol center for the Blind.

[Julia Mejia]

Well, I was going to say, Gary, that I. I am.

[Carl Richardson]

It's just. It's Greg.

[Julia Mejia]

Just Greg. Oh, my God. So somebody gave me the wrong piece of paper because they got you as the CEO of Waymo and the. Greg, like, my team better get it together. Okay, so let's go back. Let me just stay with you real quick. Right. I think there is. There was a white guy who had on a suit. I just made all types of assumptions. Oh, my God. So he was going on and on about his stuff, and I think I. I even think I even Said his name wrong. I didn't know who he was. And I felt like, you know how when you have egg in your face, like I had to pick up my face and put it back on because I was like, embarrassing.

[PJ Vogt]

Because you were giving him a hard time.

[Julia Mejia]

I'm giving him a hard time.

[PJ Vogt]

And then he has to say to you, I don't work for Waymo.

[Julia Mejia]

I was like, well, okay then. I'm still mad at you, though. It was embarrassing. I mean, you know what it was? It was like, because it sounded like he worked for Wayne Mo, because he was there advocating fiercely for that community in ways that made me feel like he was part of their team. So, yeah, I mean, I was like, okay, you're on the other side of this, but you're not really on the other side because you're sitting on the Waymo panel anyway, so you're still part of them.

[PJ Vogt]

I think that if I try to sympathize with the feeling Councillor Mejia is expressing here, this is how I understand can be annoying when the other side is a mix of people you're allowed to dismiss out of hand, tech executives allied with people you're not disability advocates. And when those advocates are all saying similar things, when it's your people, that sounds like solidarity. When it's them, it can sound phony, it can sound orchestrated. But the whole reason I'd found this fight so fascinating is because I thought it was one where you really couldn't easily dismiss anybody. For the people who believe driverless cars will save lots of lives, the human beings with jobs are an unignorable fact. For the people who want to protect those jobs, the human beings asking for better accessibility or safer roads are also an unignorable fact. This fantasy that there were blind people who were secret lobbyists was tempting, because if that were true, it would mean the world was a simpler place. It's not. The chair, Councillor Colette Zapata, said this in the room pretty explicitly. Nobody had been paid to be there.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

I think for the advocates that have been here and that have provided public testimony, especially maybe from on those in favor of this, I think it's important to say that everybody has their own individual agency and they were here on their own accord.

[PJ Vogt]

Councillor Colletta Zapata, you can see her in the video. Shoulder length, brown hair, big clear glasses. Like Councillor Mejia, she comes from an activist background. As the hearing closed that day, she'd gone from being just the neutral moderator to when it was her turn, asking the Waymo executive a Lot of questions. Questions about jobs, but also just questions about the car. How did it work? What happened when a blind person ordered one? How did they find it? She seemed to be using the hearing to try to get information, which is how I'd been trying to use the hearing. And I wondered if her experience as a participant had been at all like mine as an observer. Can I just tell you, and I don't know if this is a question or just like a statement. When I was watching the hearings, the thing that was annoying to me was like, I felt like on Waymo's side, they were unwilling to engage with the reality of job loss. But on the app drivers union side, I found myself being annoyed because I didn't see them engaging with the question of safety, the idea that these cars could prevent death or that they could be good for disabled people. It was like neither side wanted to. They just kept skipping. What to me felt like the core trade offs here. When you talk about this could be really good or this could be really bad.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

Yeah, I saw that, too. And it's my job. It's all of our jobs as folks that are trying to be thoughtful and take a comprehensive approach, to listen to every side. And that will require a lot of compromise and a lot of consensus, but I think that that's good policymaking.

[PJ Vogt]

What do you feel like you need, like, if you had a magic wand to just get exactly the information you want to have to be able to make a decision of about whether autonomous vehicles are right for Boston, what's the data you'd want to see?

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

I love the magic wand question because it always talks about, like, the possibility of getting to a place where everybody's happy, which I don't think is ever going to happen, but I would be happy to get more data of if we could. If I had a magic wand, how many folks would this employ? How many folks would ultimately lose their job? What would be the exact number of potential crashes or safety incidences on behalf of Waymo? And how does that stack up to the existing safety and traffic instances that are already happening in the city of Boston? I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot. And. Yeah, how much money is Waymo going

[PJ Vogt]

to make off of this?

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

Because I think that's a central question too. Okay, is one. One company is going to benefit, and then there could be hundreds of potentially hundreds of workers that are out of a job and what that means for our local economy. And so it behooves us as legislators to ask these difficult questions and to challenge not just these major corporations, but challenge labor unions, and to challenge advocacy organizations and to try not to get motivated by our passions.

[PJ Vogt]

This was the only time in Boston I really heard anyone say this. That to get to a good answer, every single side would need to be challenged. That finding a solution would mean refusing to offer any group blanket deference. I'd now heard the 20 year story of these cars. I'd read the safety data and I'd done my best in Boston to just listen. In general, I wasn't very satisfied with what I'd heard, but I appreciated Councillor Coletta Zapata's prescription that everyone tried to calm their passions, to ask good questions. And Councillor Mejia, for her part, said that she would like to bring all stakeholders to the table, including disability activists. Emily and I left Boston as We zipped down I95 in a human driven car, talking about what we'd seen. Here's where things stood. Back in Beantown, at the end of the second hearing, the city council had chosen not to vote on the ordinance. The functional Waymo ban that many of the councilors had spent eight hours speaking in full throated support of. It seemed possible they'd noticed that passing an ordinance that so thoroughly excluded the disability community was not politically wise. The decision on Waymo now seems to be moving to the state level. There we now have competing billsone that would approve driverless cars. The other that would require a human being behind the wheel at all times. Essentially a ban. Driving home, I had a realization about what we'd seen there. Emily and I had sat for days with different people who all believed they'd glimpsed a vision of the future. Abdiaziz had a vision of Waymo finishing what Uber had started, taking the market for itself. Carl had a vision of a future where he drove again to the beach with his wife. Councillor Mejia had an ominous vision where her neighborhood was empty, the people all replaced by machines. Everybody was here in the present, fighting for fighting against a movie playing in their minds. Here's a vision I had. See, I started to glimpse it in a conversation with reporter Timothy B. Lee. We were talking about the future. He was describing his vision of how things were about to change. He pointed out how today, if a robot driver makes a mistake, footage goes viral online. But someday soon, he imagines we'll be in a situation where the clips that go viral will be of human beings doing the kinds of things on the road that today we just tolerate. Like, can you believe this maniac is still allowed to drive I do think that society's tolerance for bad driving is going to go down. So there's been this trend over the last few decades where the amount of training you need as a teenager to get a driver's license has been going up. I think that'll continue to go up. And if somebody's caught drunk driving, we're pretty reluctant to take the driver's license away because their livelihood might depend on it. But once driverless taxes are cheap, or once you can buy a driverless vehicle, a judge might be much more comfortable saying, like the penalty fear, first instance of drunk driving is a lifetime ban on driving a car. Like, you can have a driverless car that takes you wherever you want, but you just can't get behind the wheel. In Timothy's vision, change comes fast. In about five years, driverless cars are as common as Ubers. Today. In around 10 years, every new car standard just has a Waymo package, a robot driver and sensor, a button you can press if you don't want to drive. I shared Timothy's vision. I believe driverless cars will soon be everywhere, not even just because they're safer, but because of consumer demand, the same force that broke the politicians who resisted Uber not long ago. A lot of AI is like this technology, too useful to ignore, even if it causes social pain. If we're going to be okay, we're going to need to envision some new futures, new compromises, new ways to share the dividends of progress with the people it displaces. There are precedents for this. When containerization put a ton of longshoremen out of work in the 1960s, the West coast union negotiated a deal. The employers could bring in the new machines, but they had to pay into a fund that guaranteed the existing workforce wouldn't be laid off and give early retirement payouts to workers whose jobs disappeared. You could do something like that. You could do a lot of things, but whatever we're going to do. I did not find the seeds of that new compromise in Boston. It also does not exist in D.C. which has been delaying driverless cars with bureaucratic hurdles. Or in New York, where my governor talked briefly about allowing driverless cars, then retreated under pressure. But these are the places where a bargain could likely be struck. These are where drivers, Democrats and Teamsters have for a few more years at least, leverage. They should use it. But they'll have to be inventive. They'll have to imagine visions of the future more vivid than the word no. Sam,

[Stephen Dubner]

That, again, was PJ Vote and a special two part feed drop from the Search Engine Podcast. Let us know what you think. Our email is radioreconomics.com you can also leave a comment on your favorite podcast app. Big thanks to PJ and his team for sharing this series with us. You can find the Search Engine podcast on your favorite podcast app. Also coming up next time on the show, until all cars are autonomous cars, we humans are still in charge. So we look at a new research paper which finds that driving on certain days is particularly dangerous. What days am I talking about?

[PJ Vogt]

Album release days are basically natural experiments. They're moments where millions of people suddenly now have a reason to pick up their phone and interact with it, sometimes while driving.

[Stephen Dubner]

So do Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny have blood on their hands? That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's [e-mail] where we publish transcripts and show notes for Search Engine. This episode was produced by Emily Maltaire. The show was created by P.J. vogt and Shruti Pinamani. Garrett Graham is their senior producer. Leah Rees Dennis is their executive producer. Fact checking was done by Mary Mathis and sound design and original composition by Armin Bazarian. Their production intern is Piper Dumont. For Freakonomics Radio, this episode was produced by Dalvin Abuaji and edited by Ellen Frankman. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Hilaria Montenacort, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lapinson. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

[Gabriela Colette Zapata]

The central neighborhoods of Boston, I think, are like one of the most walkable places in the entire country.

[PJ Vogt]

I don't even know what walkable means. What does walkable mean? It's like when someone says a book is a page turner. The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of Everything hey, this is Jeff Lewis from Radio Andy Live and uncensored. Catch me talking with my friends about

[Matt Walsh]

my latest obsessions, relationship issues and bodily ailments.

[PJ Vogt]

With that kind of drama that seems to follow me, you never know what's going to happen.

[Julia Mejia]

You can listen to Jeff Lewis live at home. Home or anywhere you are, download the SiriusXM app for over 425 channels of AD, free music, sports, entertainment and more. Subscribe now and get 3 months free offer details apply

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