the magic of waymo

so surreal

one thing that i was really looking forward to when visiting san francisco was riding in a waymo. waymo is a completely autonomous electric ride-sharing vehicle service operated by google and unlike other competitors in the industry like tesla, they actually have self-driving robotaxis on the road.

as of now, it’s operational to the public in sf, los angeles and phoenix and it’s going to expand to more places like miami, atlanta, dc, tokyo in the coming months/years. i had seen so many memes about waymo from the sf people that i follow on twitter and i was incredibly envious as it seemed so futuristic and a fun way to travel.

first of all, waymo has a fleet of only 750 vehicles across phoenix, la and sf and somehow managed to reach 4m rides in 2024 and is on track to reach 10m in 2025. while their vehicles are more premium than the usual uber/lyft, it’s only a couple of dollars more expensive with the added caveat that because it’s a self-driving taxi it will take longer to drive safely to your destination. it’s like a very cautious driver which i find more than offset by how insane and adorable the ride is.

despite there only being a couple hundred vehicles in its fleet, they are easily identifiable because they are big white jaguar cars with a 360° banner display on top that display your initials after you book a ride. otherwise, they just roam around the streets of sf peacefully yearning for a passenger to be useful or go to a charging station when they are running low on battery. the best part about an autonomous self-driving future is obviously not just the utopian lack of human interaction with a driver but also the safety. it was found that after 25.3 million autonomous miles driven, waymo vehicles have an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human drivers per mile driven.

anyways, enough of all these fun stats. riding in a waymo is pure magic. it’s like this abundance of techno-optimism bundled in a moving mechanical being that is just so pure. if i were a crying sort of person i think i would have cried but alas, i just wrote some tweets in all caps for dozens of likes talking about how life-changing and magical it was. in fact, throughout my short two day stay there i tried to find as many excuses as possible to waymo everywhere. the best rides were going down this little hill overlooking the city where the waymo had to make these turns up and down the hill which was simply incredible. another cool ride was going to the golden gate bridge in a thirty-minute ride which was wonderful with the sun setting while travelling through the lush greenery of presidio park.

as alluded to before, i think there is something really significant about the waymo being adorable and people talking about it online as if it were a pet dog or cat. as far as i can tell the only other robot that has won this accolade is roomba because it is a round circular vacuum robot that is ‘dumb’. it would go around your house knocking into stuff and walls and map your layout before saving that and using it for future cleanups and automatically head back to its charging station after its work was done vacuuming everything. it was simple.

waymo is that but with the added complexity of human traffic with human lives at stake if something were to go tragically wrong. maybe it’s also because i have never experienced full self-driving or even tesla autopilot-esque features before, but during those waymos i felt like i saw the light that is autonomous vehicles and why that idea has been sucking dry the greatest minds of our generation for the past decade and more. i thought about musk continuously promising that full self-driving will be made available to the entire tesla fleet “very soon” for years and constantly pushing back timelines. i thought about george hotz and his comma ai, a startup which has built an open source autopilot-esque self-driving kit for people to install in their cars to make it drive by itself.

waymo beat all their competitors to become the first robotaxi company that actually offers their services to the general public and it has practically become a must-try for visitors to the city.

while ideas for how to write this post had been ruminating in my mind for the past couple months, i got reminded of waymo because of the new openai update that significantly improved their image generation model. since its release a week or so ago, it has gone super viral especially with the 'studio ghibli’ trend where people would just ask chatgpt to make their personal images adorable in the style of the famous japanese anime art style. this past week was actually the highest traffic week for openai and the demand (proportional to the gpus they have) probably matched or even surpassed the original launch of chatgpt in november 2022.

and once again, the theme of adorableness comes up. i guess it’s just the opposite of what some people consider the end result of building agi to be: humans being replaced.

while i kinda thought of this, it was mainly inspired by a substack post i read by the great tweeter signull. he wrote a post titled “the revolution will be adorable” and it’s about the studio ghibli trend. although it’s most likely that people will forget about this trend in like five more days (it’s already died down), i think the idea remains.

another wonderful post about this studio ghibli trend was by the esteemed internet blogger scott alexander who wrote a post titled “the colors of her coat” in the astral codex ten substack. he wrote about how people tend to get one-shotted by hedonic adaptation and quickly got tired of ghiblifying everything. then he wrote about how hundreds if not thousands of people had to work together in the 15th century to get some guy in europe a rare blue dye to add to a painting. he wrote about how we should learn to appreciate the magic of the thousandth sunset just as much as the first sunset and while it’s hard to explain, he just has a way with words.

anyways, all of this to say, i think waymo is literally the closest thing i’ve felt to sci-fi irl which makes it magic. also there is literally no reason why they can’t bring this to singapore and i can’t wait for a future without interacting with a human being when being driven somewhere.