Are Human Drivers Finally Obsolete? The Journey of Autonomous Vehicles from Desert Races to Public Roads

This Freakonomics Radio episode features PJ Vogt of the Search Engine podcast, delving into the history and future of driverless cars. Vogt shares his personal transformative experience with a Waymo robo-taxi in San Francisco, highlighting how quickly futuristic technology can become normalized. The series explores the technical development of autonomous vehicles and the profound societal implications, including the potential obsolescence of human drivers. Key figures like Sebastian Thrun, a roboticist driven by personal tragedy to reduce traffic deaths, are introduced, emphasizing the vision of reshaping the modern world through AI-driven transportation.

The episode draws a historical parallel between the impending shift to driverless cars and past technological disruptions, such as the disappearance of "knocker-uppers" and "lamplighters." It contrasts these with the persistent role of the human driver, which is now on the cusp of transformation, much like how "dishwasher" or "computer" came to refer to machines. The narrative recounts the initial societal fears and regulatory battles against early automobiles, including "red flag laws" and the high death rates in unregulated cities like Detroit, underscoring the inherent dangers of human driving and the long journey society took to adapt to cars.

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the DARPA Grand Challenge, a military-funded competition designed to spur the development of autonomous vehicles. The first race in 2004 was a "hysterical disaster," with all vehicles failing, including Chris Urmson's Sandstorm and Anthony Levandowski's Ghost Rider motorcycle. However, it served to galvanize the robotics community. Sebastian Thrun, observing the first challenge, recognized that the problem was fundamentally one of software and artificial intelligence, not hardware, and was motivated by the potential to save millions of lives lost annually to traffic accidents.

The second DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 saw remarkable success, with Thrun's Stanford team and their vehicle, Stanley, winning by leveraging machine learning to teach the car to navigate the desert course. This victory marked a pivotal moment, demonstrating the viability of AI in autonomous driving. The episode concludes by revealing how Google co-founder Larry Page, inspired by the DARPA challenges, recruited Thrun to secretly develop driverless cars on public roads in California, signaling the transition from a desert spectacle to a technology poised to revolutionize everyday life and transportation.

"the first time it feels like the first time you're in an airplane and by the third time it feels like you're in an elevator."

"every time I spoke to someone as they were talking, I thought everything they were saying makes sense. I totally get it. I would be nodding my head vigorously for the most part. And then I would go talk to the next person who saw things completely differently and it would just spin my head the other way and I would think, well, this makes sense, too."

"I've been anti-human driver for about 50 years now. ... I mean, have you ever seen a human drive a car including yourself? We're not that good."

"The knocker-upper is your iPhone alarm. The lamplighter is the electric street light. The third one, driver, has persisted."

"Safety is the entire pitch for the driverless car, which is really a car driven by a computer. Driverless cars don't get drunk, tired, or distracted. They never text or feel road rage."

"There's this funny thing you lose when you move from the horse to a human-driven car, which is that in a horse-drawn carriage, the horse is not just going to run off a cliff if you let go of the reins. You lose sentience in your vehicle."

"The 2004 Grand Challenge is an utter hysterical disaster."

"I looked at this and said, "Well, wait a minute. The challenge really is to build a self-driving car that can drive through the desert. I can get a rental car that can do it just fine provided there's a person inside. And the challenge is really to take the person out of the driver's seat and replace it with a computer. That is not a problem of bigger tires. That's actually really a software problem."

"I had experiences of losing people in my life to traffic accidents, and I felt we we lost over a million people in the world to traffic accidents. Wouldn't it be amazing if DARPA invented something that would save a million lives a year?"

"What would happen next is that a small band of lunatics would take driverless cars out of the desert, start secretly driving them on public roads in the state of California."