“City by city, Waymo is making self-driving taxis a reality,” reports the Cato Institute:
Across its operations in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the company now delivers one hundred thousand rides every week. That’s not a lot for a taxi company—New York City taxi drivers pick up more fares in a day—but it’s an incredible achievement for autonomous driving. Almost exactly a year ago, Waymo provided just ten thousand rides per week…..safety-conscious parents are using Waymo to ferry their kids between home, school, and piano lessons. They prefer the driverless, remotely trackable vehicle over driving their children themselves or sending them in an Uber with a stranger. It would be hard to come up with a better testament to Waymo’s improving image.
Waymo’s journey has not been easy. Mobs and lunatics have attacked Waymo cars and even set them aflame, while local bureaucrats and unions see any misstep as an opportunity to rein in the company.
So far, Waymo has kept its adversaries at bay with a strategy of extreme caution. Their safety record far surpasses the average human driver and, so far, no death or serious injury has come from an accident caused by a Waymo vehicle.
A competitor of Waymo had worse luck. Cruise, a robotaxi operator with a worse safety record than Waymo, was banned from San Francisco. Cruise had a few high-profile accidents. Despite that, its self-driving vehicles were still safer than human drivers and probably would have reduced total traffic deaths in the city had they been allowed to replace human drivers. But Cruise being banned was not surprising: New technologies are usually perceived as more dangerous than similarly-dangerous older technologies, even when they are not in fact more dangerous.
Robots are also saving lives by doing difficult and dangerous tasks. German robots are hunting the North Sea for tens of thousands of unexploded World War II bombs.
Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells. Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer. “In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists…have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply.”
