In honor of yesterday’s nonspecific point in the gradual arrival of self-driving cars, an interview with myself.

Interviewer: It sounds like you’re pretty excited about self-driving cars. Weren’t you just saying that unemployment from AI is on some kind of very overlapping continuum with extinction from AI? Isn’t rooting for self-driving cars rooting for AI unemployment here, and thus extinction?

Katja: Hmm. Well first I should say, I’m actually fairly neutral on unemployment in general from technology. If technology makes it overall easier to produce what we want, but empowers some people over others, that change in power might be a downside (or not), but if so, it’s one I’m inclined to solve with direct redistribution rather than having the people who would be disempowered do unnecessary busywork to ‘earn’ their living.

Interviewer: Ok, so you think AI unemployment is different?

Katja: Yes, because it involves the disempowerment of humans in general in favor of non-people entities whose empowerment has a decent chance of spelling our ruin. Doing things the hard way to avoid that happening isn’t busywork, it’s very valuable. I don’t usually want to take sides between different humans systematically—society seems probably best served by letting the most effective production methods win out in most cases. But sometimes there are entities who produce things efficiently, and you still shouldn’t trade with them because it empowers them. It’s a lot like not trading with Nazis (broadly—I’m not saying AI entities are evil in the same way, just that their empowerment has a good chance of leading to genocide or omnicide).

Interviewer: Ok, but aren’t self-driving cars AI?

Katja: Yes, but the class of entities I don’t want to empower isn’t ‘AI’ really—it’s more like ‘AI agents’. Though also, the processes that are creating them, such as LLM companies, which complicates things. Self-driving cars are narrow and not much like entities that can be empowered. And my understanding is that we could have perfectly great self driving without using risky AI. But maybe I should be opposed—I’m not sure how to think about what class of entities I should not want empowered.

Interviewer: Are you just in love with self driving cars because they would be so personally convenient for you?

Katja: That is probably playing a role. A car with a random stranger in it is just so much less what I want most of the time than a car by myself. I like to imagine that Uber was invented like, “New startup idea: Chatroulette but you’re stuck in a moving vehicle with the person!” I would feel worse about the end of driving as a human profession if I felt like human drivers consistently did the job acceptably well. But the rate of drivers around here seeming chemically impaired or choosing to drive on the kerb of the freeway to get around other cars, etc, and also talking to me when I don’t want to talk, means there are a lot of cases where I would like to go somewhere in a car except it seems to awful so I don’t.

Interviewer: So how was the self driving car last night?

Katja: non-existent. Once I arrived at the airport, the Waymo app informed me that I wasn’t allowed to get cars there, because they are rolling it out slowly or something. I considered trying from one transit stop outside the airport, but since the available Waymo map was a very uninformative cartoon of the Bay Area and it was after midnight, that felt risky.

Interviewer: Did you give up?

Katja: Not immediately. I had also been told that people are taking ‘robotaxis’ all over, so I looked that up. I couldn’t immediately figure out what it was by Googling and looking on the Android app store, so I messaged some friends, and they directed me to an app called ‘RoboTaxi’ purportedly from Tesla but with barely readable and amateurish font and 57 reviews. As is often perplexingly the case with things of importance to a lot of people from very well known brands, I felt like I was exploring an obscure frontier that nobody had tried to use before. (You want to do what?? Get a ride in one of our cars?? And you want to do it through an app?? And you want to know where they are available??) I logged in and it told me the airport was also out of bounds. So then I gave up.

Interviewer: How did that make you feel?

Katja: ashamed

Interviewer: That makes sense. Why did you even so brazenly think you would probably be able to get a self-driving car from the airport?

Katja: well locally, because Waymo had a map indicating that the airport was within their zone, and I figured Tesla wouldn’t have such a can’t-do attitude. But more fundamentally, I guess I haven’t properly internalized how opposed airports are to efficient travel. Seeking a human-driven car after all this, I was reminded further because the location of the rideshare pickup at the airport and the signage indicating the location, both seem like they should probably be crimes.

Interviewer: Might it be an even broader problem with your level of techno-optimism? Weren’t you just the other day very disappointed by a futuristic kettle? Perhaps you need to learn that everything is shit?

Katja: maybe, but I don’t know, sometimes technology really changes things. I remember before Uber, when I just had to phone a person at a taxi company and ask them to come and collect me and then wait for an unknown period of time, and worst case give up and walk home.

Interviewer: How was your ride home last night?

Katja: Pretty good. The Lyft driver didn’t perceive my initial desire not to talk, and so we had a detailed discussion of Yemen, his life as an immigrant, his family, arranged marriage, romance in Islam, experiences running different businesses, the nature of business partnership, AI risk, and other drivers’ views on automation. We exchanged details so we could interact again.

Interviewer: Do you really think your quest to instead drive home in sterility wasn’t completely misguided?

Katja: Humans are great, but you have to be allowed to want solitude sometimes. It follows that you should probably be allowed to want solitude while also getting to another location. That said, I probably want solitude unhealthily much, and underrate the loss of human connection from these innovations. Maybe there should be a tax or something.