Self driving is here. But not like you thought.

So a couple weeks ago, I clicked on this video that just blew my mind. About to do my first driverless ride, typing in an address, requesting a car. Okay, this guy's name is Kyle, and he's calling for a ride. Totally normal. I do this all the time. Car arrives, Kyle looks inside. Guys, there is nobody in this car. There's no one in the car. Kyle is the CEO of the company that makes these cars, but this isn't just some private company demo. Dozens of people across San Francisco are calling for rides and finding nobody else inside. Oh my god, this is so cool. This feels weird. Um, what's happening? I'll admit, you know I'm an optimist, but I was getting a little bit cynical about self-driving cars. Like, it does feel like every few years, they say that self-driving cars will be here in another few years. But after watching this video, I wondered, are they finally here? So I took a deep dive into that question over the past few months, not just into driverless taxis, but also all of the other driverless stuff that I'd heard about, trying to piece together the big picture here. I actually ended up in San Francisco interviewing Kyle himself. Now it's very clear that this is something different. It's a robo-taxi. The answer that I found to whether self-driving cars are actually here is yes. They just don't look like what I thought. It's not that single go-anywhere sci-fi version. It's actually two very different approaches, two competing ideas of what the near future of self-driving might look like, fighting it out on the road. And our lives are about to look very different, depending on who wins. I live in New York, but all of those self-driving cars, they're in San Francisco, so that's where I've got to go. On the way, some context. This conversation isn't about some binary switch from us driving cars to cars just driving themselves. It's more like this. A long road from one to the other with a lot of messy middle. And we've been driving down this road for decades. Back in the mid-1900s, we got basic cruise control, where you could set a speed. And in the early 2000s, we got help from our cars in key moments, like emergency braking. And then we got more continuous support, like lane centering or adaptive cruise control. It would match the car in front of you, right? And as we got farther down this road, we started to see where we were headed more clearly. And we began to categorize the journey into levels of self-drivingness. Gotta watch for bikes. These are the levels you might hear about today. Level 0, momentary help. Level 1, more continuous support. Level 2 is newer, like highway piloting systems. This is where we are now with the limit of most cars we can easily buy. With all of the levels that we've gotten to so far, humans are still very much in charge. But as we get higher, maybe not so much. The idea is that we'd first just be monitoring the car. And then it would be fully in charge, but only in certain situations or areas. And then the last level would be cars in charge anywhere, anytime. You're asleep. I knew that we were here, and that lots of companies were working hard on these. But those self-driving taxis, the ones that are already picking people up? They're here. And it's not just them. Now that you know the levels and where we are now, here's the really key thing to understand about where we're headed. A lot of the headlines that I see are about the effort to get to that last sci-fi level. This way. And we're not that close. Like, I don't know how long level 5 is going to take, but a lot of the predictions kind of seem like bullshit. Instead, the interesting fight right now is actually just within the level we're already on. Full self-driving, but within constraints. For example, training vehicles to drive anywhere that doesn't have too much complexity. Like, just on highways. Or in more complex areas, but they have to be trained there. You can't just drop them into a new city. In other words, the fight for the future of self-driving isn't just happening this way. It's happening this way, too. And that's the fight I want to talk about. But before we get to that, I love to learn about big changes to how things work, which is why I'm so interested in the sponsor for this episode, a company called Masterworks. Masterworks is a fintech company, financial technology. And there's some research to show that Americans use fintech apps now more than social media. Masterworks is part of that movement to try and save people time and money. Masterworks does that by letting people invest in art in a new way. It used to be that you could only invest in art if you could also afford to shell out millions of dollars. But Masterworks lets you buy a stake in a work of art. The way that this works is by breaking a painting up into shares. Basically, Masterworks buys a painting, and then they register it with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an LLC. And then members are basically investing in the company that is that painting. Masterworks were the first people to actually do this. It's an interesting idea because blue-chip contemporary art has more than doubled the S&P 500, which is an index that tracks the general stock market, for the last 20 years. And Masterworks says they've delivered over 30% net returns to their members since 2019 from selling their paintings. They're giving you priority to skip their waitlist, so go check them out. Just click the link in my description to join over 400,000 members already on the platform. All right, where were we? Here I am in sunny San Francisco. I'm about to go interview the CEO of Cruise, and I'm going to take a not-self-driving car to get there because it's really hard to get into one of those self-driving cars. I think this is my car. Hi, how are you? The company I'm going to visit, Cruise, is an example of one of the two big visions for how to use self-driving cars within our current level. To understand these visions, you have to understand the two big divides within the big picture of self-driving cars. The first is where we'd use them. Less complex situations, but anywhere? Or more complex, but geographically constrained? Different companies are working on each. OK, I think this is it. Yeah. Hi, I'm looking for the Cruise office. Yes, this is it. Great. I'm here to interview the CEO. Ah, OK, perfect. I can help you. Thank you very much. I know I introduced him as just like this guy, but Kyle is a really big deal. I'm a little nervous. All right, here we go. I've seen the video of you getting into the driverless car on the public street for the first time. What did that feel like? Well, it was high pressure. This wasn't like a staged thing. That was the first time, and so I was pretty nervous. What have you learned from the results of that test so far? The things we're learning are all the weird nuances between humans and machines that we take for granted. Do you want to tell me what's the most interesting? So sometimes people use this service to come home from restaurants or even bars. Maybe you have a few drinks, and that makes you sleepy. And so we've had multiple people fall asleep. You fell asleep? In the back, what do we do? The car is just kind of waiting, you know, for them to wake up. What do you do? Well, we detect if people don't exit the vehicle quickly. And so someone from our customer support popped on the audio and said, hi, are you still in the car? I never thought of that problem, but yeah. Like when technology meets the real world, sometimes it's a little bit bumpy. You might have seen this other example. This is kind of my favorite. A future is here. Bizarre encounter between police and a driverless car has gone viral on social media. Officer then looked inside that car. Only to discover... Ain't nobody in it. And then the car speeds away from the officers. Are you serious? Everyone, including police, were laughing. I'm glad that, you know, the first thing that went wildly viral was a rather humorous and, you know, somewhat clumsy interaction between humans and machines. There's an enormously complex system of audio detection, visual detection for the sirens and flashing lights. In this video, you saw all of that working perfectly. This marvel of engineering part that was a little awkward is, you know, a police officer goes up and doesn't see anyone inside. And you see the police officer interacting with a customer support person and not realizing that when they walk away from the vehicle and turn off the sirens, the vehicle thinks it's safe to go. In fact, you know, it detected that it was still supposed to be pulled over and did what it was programmed to do, which is go across the intersection and find a safe place to pull over. It was certainly a first and something kind of interesting. This is what it's like to take on all of the complexity of a city. OK, now for the second big divide within self-driving. Whether to carry people. You've probably seen what goes here. Cities, no people. Delivery robots. And finally, this square is really important. Highways, no people. Long distance, autonomous trucking. The two biggest, most different visions for self-driving at our current level are these two. Imagine being able to move goods long distances with no humans involved. In this future, you probably don't experience self-driving as often, but it might impact your life in even bigger ways if it reshapes the way that we move goods around the world. The autonomous truck revolution is here. This truck is driving itself. They don't sleep, they don't drink, they don't get distracted. You're not actually using them for deliveries yet, are you? We are actually. It not only drives, it does so as politely as possible. The future is now. You're probably going to see these on the road soon. And I found this analogy for how they'll change our lives that I just can't get out of my head. They'll be different from human-driven trucks in the same way a hundred guys with shovels are not an excavator. Okay, now imagine a different future that looks like this. Much more in your life. You call a car, a driverless one shows up. I'm walking with Kyle to go see the cars that they have now, but just listen to him describe the next cruise car. Not the one called the Bolt, but the Origin. It gets rid of the stuff that people don't need, like a steering wheel and brake pedals and a lot of the other stuff that was meant for the driver that is just kind of silly to keep around if there is no driver. The feeling of taking a steering wheel out of a car makes me nervous. How do you think about the reality that a driver couldn't take over one of those cars? Even now, the Bolt vehicles that we have, you can't take control of them. You're in the back seat and there's plexiglass holding you back and it's because at this point, if you were to reach up and try to interfere with the vehicle, you'd probably make it worse. As weird as it sounds, you know, we're there, we're ready. These are the two near futures for self-driving cars. The ones that might actually change your real life in the next few years. In the longer-term future, we might look back and think it was crazy to drive at all. That we put teenagers behind the wheel of huge death machines. That people had to drive for days to deliver stuff to other people. The status quo of humans driving cars involves a lot of risk. People 20 years from now will see the humans of today as kind of barbaric. We let kids who just got their driver's license drive, you know, a two-ton vehicle on the highway at 80 miles an hour. And it involves a lot of time. There's not many things that you can do today to give people back like an hour or more of their time. I think that's going to be profound. In the meantime, now that you know these levels and approaches, maybe you'll see the headlines a little bit differently. And when you encounter these cars on the road, you'll know how they fit into the big picture. Oh, cool. There she is. This is Poppy. Hey, Poppy. Are we allowed to get in it? I think so. The most important thing that I learned through all of this, though, is bigger than self-driving cars. It's this. Don't wait for the sci-fi version before paying attention. The future is made in the messy, messy middle. And that's what we're in right now.