Silicon Valley Doesn’t Know What Makes a Good City w/ Joanne McNeil

0:00 This facade of automation that could lead to automation that could lead to it, it does all kind of come back to COVID. It comes back to that class divide where it's completely giving up on a working class.

0:43 If you've been listening to the show for a while, you will probably be familiar with Joanne. She's been on the show in the past, but she had a great new piece where she looked into the proliferation of things like delivery robots and robotaxis or autonomous vehicles on the streets of, you know, a growing number of US cities and what that actually feels like and what that actually means.

1:06 And I thought it was a good opportunity to have this conversation again, right? I feel like, you know, we talked a lot about these things in the past, and then it kind of like died off for a little bit, right? But the companies didn't stop pushing this vision for the future of cities and for the future of streets.

1:22 And so, you know, I think now, especially as we see, I would argue, this renewed push for robotaxis and self-driving vehicles and the like, I think it's the right moment to talk about this again, to talk about why this is a problem and why we shouldn't be allowing our cities and sidewalks to be transformed to serve the needs and the desires of these tech companies that are pushing this particular vision for how delivery and transportation should work instead of one that centers people instead of robots.

1:52 And that is actually about improving mobility for so many different people to make it easier to get the places that you need to go to actually improve people's lives rather than just trying to realize, you know, sci-fi visions that particular founders might have that they think are the way that society should go, regardless of whether the actual evidence is behind the types of things that they want to see realized.

2:14 So, needless to say, I really enjoyed this conversation with Joanne. I always enjoy speaking with her, and I think you're going to like it too. If you do, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.

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2:45 Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Joanne, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

2:50 Hi, Paris. It's always great talking with you.

2:53 Absolutely. I I'm thrilled to have you back on the show. Obviously, we've talked about your two previous books in the past, and it's always a thrill to dig into these issues with you because I think you have such great insights on this industry and like so many things happening with it. And of course, when we talked about your novel Wrong Way, that really has to do with this notion of autonomous vehicles and the labor that powers it.

3:16 And it's just a fascinating and fantastic story to get you to look at these things in a different way. And you had this new piece that you've written where you're looking at robotaxis and automated delivery and all this kind of stuff. You know, you've been writing about these things for a while. What keeps you interested in this subject matter that kind of keeps you coming back to it?

3:36 I got into it a little bit in this piece, but part of it is as someone who writes science fiction, who grew up reading science fiction, I'm fascinated with this conundrum we have right now of automation as something that's not one or the other, but something blended, that you have these like senators and the way that human existence is hidden in that puzzle.

4:04 And I think most of your listeners will be familiar with the mechanical turk, but in some ways, even that is a little bit too simple for this example because it's like we're looking at a technology on the street, and there's an illusion of imperfection and dominance, and that this robotaxi is better by nature being computation than what a human driver can do.

4:37 So its existence right now is to encourage us all to believe in the automation. But there is, in fact, so much human labor that is involved, and a company like Google cannot admit to because then the illusion falls apart.

4:55 It's so interesting to see how these narratives seem so resilient in the sense that as I was reading your piece and as I've been just reading some of the recent reporting on Waymo and autonomous driving and you know some of these delivery companies that you talk about in the book as well, I was just struck by like how so many of the narratives that I feel like we heard a decade ago and that seemed like we knew are not really how these things were playing out.

5:22 Like it doesn't seem like that matters. And and they're returning and they're kind of repeating the same points again. And it's like, have have we learned nothing? Like, can they really get away with trying to push this whole vision on us a second or third time? And you know, they're not going to face like critical questions for it.

5:37 It's mind-blowing to me.

5:39 Yeah, I think part of it is looking for this unbiased source, something that is not touched by humanity means it doesn't have the biases and personality of humanity. When I visited the place that Cocoa Robotics is located, this garage, I was parking my car and I started to panic that I was going to run over one of the delivery robots.

6:04 And part of the reason that it was very stressful to me is like, if I had run one of them over, it would not be a matter of this little thing that's running around everywhere and difficult to see. It would be a matter of me, this messy, incompetent human doing what humans do, which is mistakes, as opposed to these perfect robots that are completely innocent of anything.

6:29 They're just running around and being little. It's just like that's what we're at with this moment of automation, is that I mean, humanity by nature is complicated. We don't love every human we encounter as humans. We bond with some, we have our disagreements or hatred of others. But if you can construct something and call it neutral, which I mean, a theme that comes up on your show all the time is technology as the illusion of neutrality, then all of our reactions to and interactions with this technology, that's the problem.

7:10 The technology itself is not to blame. So I felt with this piece it was really important to kind of dig into who are the players here? Why is this technology everywhere in LA? And what is it all about?

7:25 These companies definitely love us to think that way. And, you know, when you're talking about like being fearful that you're that you'll run over like the perfect little robot, I'm sure it's one of those ones with like the little faces on it as well that try to make it friendly and approachable. But you know, when you talk about how these bots and these robotaxis are increasingly, especially in a city like LA, you know, increasingly visible.

7:47 You see them in more places. Kind of the jumping off point of this story is your decision to actually follow one of these robots and you know, see what it was doing, where it was going, how it was actually interacting with people and kind of the infrastructure and all those sorts of things. What motivated you that day to just be like, I'm gonna see where this thing is going and what is going on with this?

8:07 The story came together because the editors for the New York Review of Architecture came from New York to LA in the springtime to meet with people who might write for the publication. And my editor, Sammy, talked to me at dinner. He's like, These robots are everywhere. What is going on here? Because it's not like that in New York.

8:25 And it got me thinking because I saw them on the west side and be like, this is weird, this is annoying. I'm glad they're not in my neighborhood. But within weeks of talking to Sammy, I saw one in my neighborhood, which is on the east side. It's my neighborhood is Echo Park. And I had gone out for a walk.

8:45 I saw one around the corner from me. And I figured, you know, I'm I'm already going on a walk. Why don't I see where this thing is headed? And I took some videos. I mean, it's one thing to see these robots while you're walking around and you have just like some weird interaction with it, where the common response is that these things are plowing through the center of the sidewalk.

9:11 So you probably have to get out of the way for it. But if you do that just once in a while and you're not running into them all the time, because in my neighborhood, I this was the first time I saw one, it might just go in the back of your mind. It was like, that was weird, but not really think about it again.

9:24 In this case, I was really intentional about following this robot. So, first I took up my phone and I took a video of it going up Echo Park Ave. And the first interaction with humans that I saw was the Coco robot really like looking like it was headed straight for a young woman's knees. Like it was right in the center of the sidewalk.

9:48 She is walking with her friends, and she has to get out of the way to let it through. And I I'd done that myself a few times, and I hadn't really, like I meant to work, I hadn't really thought hard about what it is that you're getting out of the way for this robot. But then immediately after, the same thing happened to a guy that was right behind her.

10:09 So I caught it on video. And in the course of reporting the story, I just kept watching this video. I'm like, this is nuts. This is so crazy that like we have to make way for this robot. And it's not even like a robot, it's a robot that's remote controlled by teleoperators. But nevertheless, it's on the sidewalks.

10:30 And something I do need to point out with this story is that there is a misconception of LA as a car dominant city. There are neighborhoods that are certainly car dominant. There are neighborhoods that are very difficult to get to from my neighborhood. But the neighborhood that I live in, Echo Park, I walk everywhere.

10:50 I walk to the grocery store, I walk to get coffee, to go to restaurants, I'm walking all the time. I moved to this neighborhood specifically to experience pedestrian life in LA. And I might take my car out once or twice a week. I really rarely use my car. So when I saw this robot on the sidewalks, which I love, I love walking on, I start to get really defensive.

11:17 Like, what are you doing? Why are you here? You are not a human. You're not interacting like a human would, which a human on a sidewalk is not going to plow in the center of the street and expect everyone to part. I mean, you'll see people like holding hands on a date, and the robot is just like got it right through them.

11:38 And it's just ridiculous. So the thing is like the robots I found out in the course of reporting are programmed not to actually hit anybody. But as a human being, when it is right there, so close to your knees, you don't, you don't have a moment to trust whether or not it is not actually going to hit you.

12:00 If it looks like it's going to hit you, you're going to have that fight or flight response to it. And everyone is like moving out inside. And it's so funny that if you can go on Reddit and see the most common response to these robots is why do I have to get in like a tree pit and wait for this robot to pass?

12:21 What is going on here? So even if they are programmed not to hit people, they behave like they are going to hit you.

12:30 Which is like kind of scary and worrying, right? Like obviously we don't have them where I am, luckily, but I've run into them in San Francisco. And like you're saying, like if you just see one here and there, it's like, oh, this is like a novelty. Like you you don't really think twice about it other than to notice it passing by.

12:46 But I'm sure if you're seeing them like all the time, like it really starts to grate at you and you start to notice these issues with them. And I was really struck in the piece because you talked about one of the co-founders of Coco Robotics, Zach Rash, and you described how like you're talking about how these robots are like heading toward people's knees, heading toward people's legs, and like they stop quite abruptly if you're not like getting out of the way.

13:10 And it seemed like he had a very different idea of like what was acceptable there, what it meant to yield for somebody, and you know, even like why it's okay that these robots are using the sidewalks.

13:22 I will say that Zach, the co-founder, is he's quite kind, he's very personable, and I liked our conversation. I felt like he was a decent human. But in that part of our conversation where I brought up these interactions on the street and what it's like, he just kept saying that they yield to pedestrians.

13:43 And I found that surprising. And I kept going through that in my tape. So, like, is he really just saying yield? Because, like, to me, to yield is to actually like take a beat, let people pass, not go right up to someone. If it was a human being who was a couple of inches away from you, that would be an incredibly aggressive behavior, even if you don't touch this person, it's incredibly aggressive.

14:10 So the the robots do slow down when they detect humans. And they are programmed to find another route. If a sidewalk is blocked with people or something, they will be redirected to find another way to get to a place. But at the same time, there is something just very unneighborly about that. Like if you if you happen to be in a wheelchair that takes up the full width of a sidewalk, you are in this hypothetical example being confronted with a robot going all the way up to you, then turning around.

14:46 And like, it's just, it's so rude. Like it's just this if you you can't really have it both ways. If you want a robot to be like a human who's friendly, Coco does not have like a face on their robots. They're designed to look like robots, but there are some that are designed to look kind of friendly.

15:04 But if if you want this robot to be this kind of friendly, plucky little golden retriever-esque machinery, and then also act in a way that if anything red-blooded behaved that way, you would run the other way. Like you just would not want to be any. If it was a dog that was acting like that, you would not want that dog on the loose.

15:28 It seems like something really fundamental here that the technology hadn't wasn't ready for prime time. It certainly wasn't ready to be all over the place in LA the way it is right now.

15:40 Even just like the idea that that these companies have basically just decided that the robot should be on the sidewalks, right? You know, the place that is kind of left over after cars took so much more of the space associated with roads a century ago or whatever. And it's like, okay, we have our little space here where we are allowed to walk and, you know, at least theoretically, not have to worry about being hit by a car.

16:05 And now it's like, okay, you're not gonna get hit by a car, but one of these delivery robots are gonna come pretty close to you and make you feel that maybe they will hit you if you don't get out of the way.

16:14 And I mean, sidewalks are taxpayer funded. I mean, this is like, and they're not enormously robust or like a priority of cities necessarily. So to have this feeling of, you know, this attack on sidewalks, this is something that we really need to protect. And if something is going to change city life on the sidewalk level, well, you kind of need to talk to communities.

16:39 As far as I know, like they're not really getting into communities, they're they're talking to local restaurants. And I do feel like that is there is some legitimacy to it that we live in in not necessarily post-COVID, but post-quarantine times. Restaurants are cash-strapped, they are dealing with LA rents like everybody else.

17:00 And if they need to get some delivery orders out in order to keep going as a restaurant, as a physical location, that is a bind. But the other element of that is as I went for my walk, I watched the robot go to someone's house. The person came out and picked up whatever they had ordered to eat. The robot turned around.

17:23 I should also point out that like there were just things that I could observe on my walk alone, which was just like, this doesn't really go that fast. It goes about five miles an hour. I I realized that because I was on its trail. I could slow walk or I could fast walk. I didn't have to like jog after it.

17:42 As the robot was turning around to return to wherever it came from, it lands at this massive complex of ghost kitchens called Echo Park Eats. And it's been a problem for the neighborhood because it means like people are constantly driving to this part of the neighborhood and driving away. There's this little area out front that you have 15 minutes to wait for an order.

18:07 So it's kind of seamless for the actual deliverers because they don't have to worry about finding parking or anything like that. But it's become really congested in a way that this part of town wasn't designed to be. Like there's nobody who imagined in a dense neighborhood like Echo Park that there would be what is a distribution center, essentially.

18:31 It's a distribution center of meals that's opened up at the end of the street. So this part of town is it's definitely notorious. And it's also because like there's a sign out front that says goop kitchen, and everyone's like, goop kitchen, like, and it's just like so. I mean, it's already kind of a joke with the neighborhood and kind of a problem for the neighborhood.

18:52 So, of course, I I kind of guessed that's where it came from, but when I got there, it just felt like, of course.

19:00 Of course, it's all tied into like one big infrastructure, you know, the delivery robots and the ghost kitchens and everything else. I was really interested actually to see that show up in the piece because I feel like I feel like I've read stories about ghost kitchens, and it's been really interesting to me because Travis Kalnik, formerly of Uber, is like big in the ghost kitchen game, his company Cloud Kitchens.

19:23 And unlike with Uber, where he was like very bombastic and very out there and you know, wanting to like be the face of this company and to make sure everybody knew it, I feel like with cloud kitchens, it's much more like you don't really hear much from him. And he's not really like trying to make cloud kitchens a big brand that everybody knows about.

19:44 It's almost like they're trying to evade that kind of public attention so that when things like the cloud kitchen or the ghost kitchen you're talking about set up, it's like maybe for a while people don't realize it's there, or it's harder to like immediately, you know, get people to turn against it or something.

20:01 I'd be interested to hear more in like what you feel the impacts of that are on the community, because I feel like one of the concerns I've heard is that like, you know, you set up a bunch of these ghost kitchens, and that is obviously going to draw people away from restaurants that expect human clientele to show up.

20:20 It's funny because this particular ghost kitchen, which is one of Travis Kalonics, I first encountered it because I think I was just searching for Indian food in my neighborhood, and I just walked down the down the street and ended up here, and I was like, oh wow, this is so weird. This is like a dead mall slash it was just like I could I couldn't really wrap my head around like how a building this large could house a ghost kitchen.

20:47 Well, I mean, it's basically one kitchen, but they were like cooking everything there. But there was something just like conceptually wrong about it. But like if I if I were to look up all these places on Grubhub or something, it would just sound like all these various different places, or you know, the the way that we know ghost kitchens can be that sometimes it's a restaurant like Chunky Cheese that just has rebranded itself as this like fancy Italian place.

21:12 And this case, it's really just listings, it's just branding and nothing. And it was something it was it was really strange when I got there the first time. And I think for a lot of us as tech journalists, we we come across things that are unusual or anomalies a lot of the time. And it's hard to like thread the needle.

21:34 So even the delivery carts, like when I first encountered them, I've lived in LA now almost three years. And I'd see them around when I was in other neighborhoods and be like, okay, that's that's a little corny or something. But I I didn't really have a sense of what was wrong about them. And what's wrong about them kind of connects to all of these things that this sort of way that the silicon Valley mindset, even if these aren't Silicon Valley based companies, they have the Silicon Valley mindset, is colonizing a city like Los Angeles and on the street level at a time when everyone is feeling squeezed.

22:15 It's an expensive, it's a very expensive place to live. So when you have something like a ghost kitchen that is on its website bragging about its way of optimizing food and meals, you have to understand that even a restaurant that might see benefits of using something like a delivery robot, their time will be up if this is the process of efficiency, if this is what optimization means.

22:45 And it worries me also as someone who lives in LA and hey, is this expensive rent? Because I want to be part of the city because I want to be able to enjoy these restaurants. I want to enjoy the coffee shops. I genuinely love my neighborhood and the opportunity to go down the street and have a nice meal means a lot to me.

23:11 So this sense of how a city can be crunched into these spaces of nothingness, which I'd say ghost kitchen kind of is. It's like it's air.

23:31 Don't lie, Joanne. I I know that you just want your Mr. Beast burger delivered in your delivery robot to your home from the ghost kitchen down the street. That's what we all want. That's our optimized food intake from influencer brands churned out of large kitchens in nondescript locations. Uh no, it's uh it sounds terrible, right?

23:50 I'm curious, like, this doesn't really exist where I am, at least not yet. Is there any like meaningful, because you talked about how people are angry about this ghost kitchen and all of the traffic and and noise that it would create with all these people going to this location to pick it up? Like, is there any meaningful effort to shut down things like that or or to get the delivery robots off the sidewalks or or anything like that?

24:16 I have only seen individual instances of resistance so far. A friend of mine said that she saw a dog poop bag on a delivery robot. And I am still kind of like that to me feels like an act of resistance. Where it's possible people are never going to want their food delivered by robots if there's a possibility of a dog poop bag on top of the robot.

24:40 I would say like 100%, that could be the thing that kills it for the city. So if you do have a little doggy bag and you don't know where to put it and there's a delivery robot, Mickey delivery, if that feels right to you, go right ahead. They are often tagged up. I don't know what the person, the graffiti artist, is thinking when they tag up a delivery robot, but I I have to imagine some of them are doing it out of this being a target that is it's just left out there in the city to just wander.

25:11 So it will get people's attention. So yeah, you will, especially downtown, you see them covered in graffiti quite a bit. And I mean the burning whey mos that your guests, I know of we've all kind of marveled at the burning wheymos and the protests. That was sure it's a gesture that they're they happen to be there at this time, but they happen to be there and they carry politics as an object, as an these are contested vehicles, these are nefarious vehicles in the minds of many.

25:42 Speaking about the politics of it, I think that gets to another really interesting part of the piece as well, right? And I want to talk about Waymo a bit more, but maybe this is kind of a segue to do that, which is that obviously at the time when you are following this delivery robot and you're seeing kind of Waymo vehicles move into your city is also a time when you know you're seeing a lot more immigration raids from ICE, when you know you're having federal law enforcement on the streets in LA, which we're seeing kind of Donald Trump unleash on so many cities in the United States right now.

26:13 What is the contrast? Or like what are you reflecting on as you see, on the one hand, you know, this authoritarian power of the state appearing on the streets, but then also these kind of like products of the tech industry moving into the street and how some are very much like allowed, accepted, things need to be made open for these tech products to move in.

26:32 And then on the other hand, it's like, you know, you have people moving into your communities to really grab your neighbors basically and try to take them away.

26:39 Yes. I mean, that was really critical for me to get right in this piece because I had a lot of anxiety because I do not typically write about ice, not because I have anything but contempt and belief that it should be abolished, but because I don't feel like I'm a sophisticated voice who can offer analysis with the might that is necessary for something at that with those stakes.

27:05 But in this piece, it was very critical for me to get over my own anxiety and feeling like I'm not the right person to say this to actually put the two and two together, that this is a technology that's very visible on a street level at exactly the same time as the city is rattled by displacement and a brutal displacement of community members.

27:33 I can't disentangle the two. Perhaps it might be different for someone who has been seeing these delivery robots in their neighborhood for a couple months, but I saw that Cocoa robot in Echo Park the month that all of this had come to a head and the month of the protest, the month of the acceleration of the ice raids.

27:55 And it seemed to me that this is a real fatuous exaggeration of all the worst progress, if you could call it that, the worst, the worst changes and transitions since COVID. And I thought again about how throughout the quarantine we heard again and again a lot of tremendous reporting, a lot of not great reporting, but like again and again that we had this class divide that COVID was exaggerating, that you could stay at home, make banana bread, be cozy, work from home, white-collar worker, or you were out in the streets left to die, and oftentimes serving the needs of those people making banana bread, serving the needs as a warehouse worker at Amazon, processing orders from these work-from-home

28:52 workers who just are online shopping all day and not really thinking again with like hidden labor, the hidden labor of warehouse workers. I mean, in those early days, you would hear about COVID infections spreading throughout Amazon warehouses, throughout, I mean, I had a lot of difficulty handling the idea of like Barnes and Noble warehouse workers were getting COVID as an author who would benefit from people ordering my books from a warehouse.

29:23 This is something that we never really resolved as a society. I mean, there's plenty that we haven't resolved. We haven't even resolved on the left. I mean, the left, like it's something that the nature of class in the United States is a very muddled conversation unless you're continually raising it again and again.

29:46 So I saw this technology as almost like the inevitable final step of what had already been set up, that you could be a warehouse worker who it doesn't matter if you live or die, you are just out there serving the needs of the work from home class. What if you don't even need to be there? Like then you literally can just die and be replaced by robots.

30:11 And one of the people I spoke to for my story, I happened to meet a woman at a party while I was working on the story. And she came from Salinas and she was telling me that's why there isn't much protection for the farm workers in Salinas, because the agricultural companies assume they can just automate the labor that they're missing from these ice raids.

30:36 So if it had been several years ago, maybe they would have stepped up and been like, hey, we really need these workers. But right now they're very optimistic about the possibility of just automating it. And you know what? It might be worse, it might be, it might be whatever, but if it's worse in a way that they can still make a profit, they're going to continue.

30:56 So that's what we have right here. We have these technologies, these farcical technologies, robo taxis, delivery robots that are in fact piloted in some way by human labor. And I would encourage people to please read my story about Waymo, because it's a little bit complicated. They're very, very savvy about the language they use to make it sound like this is just automation.

31:21 That is a lie. And I can't emphasize that enough. Like Waymo is straight up lying. And they are lying about something that's that can be quite dangerous. They're right now, I think they have like 2,000 Waymo's on the road all over the country. It feels like they're everywhere because they're constantly driving.

31:40 They're constantly circling around. It's this ghost car that is just circling around, drives in a way that feels eerie, like there's there is something a little bit eerie about it, drives imperfectly. I mean, I think every LA driver has a strange encounter with a Waymo that they can tell over drinks one night.

32:02 Mine is that I was parallel parking, and I noticed that a car was like aggressively not letting me park. And I was just so stressed out. I was like, what is up with this asshole? Like, how come you can't see that I'm just trying to park? It's like every human being would recognize what I'm doing is about to parallel park into the space.

32:23 Just get out of the way. And it would not get out of the way. It just like was so, and I don't have one of those cars that has like a video monitor of the back or whatever. Like I had to like just look around to like, what is up with that? You are not giving me enough space to like comfortably park. Then I turn around and I look and I see the little spinning top at the top of sensors that, and I'm like, oh, this is a white jaguar.

32:47 Oh, it's got a spinning top sensor on the hood. Ah, you are automation assisted by teleops. Okay, hi. That's why you're being so aggressive here. So it's like I we all have these encounters, this facade of automation that could lead to automation that could lead to it. It does all kind of come back to COVID.

33:14 It comes back to that class divide where it's completely giving up on a working class. And I can't stand that. And I don't have the answers here, other than to raise that this cannot be acceptable as a neighbor, we have to be a neighbor across class, across generations, across identities. That's what being a neighbor is.

33:40 So if being a neighbor in Equip Park means everyone who makes less than, I don't know, $50,000 a year can just die. I don't think I'm exaggerating here to say that's what it feels like. That everybody who actually has a hard day's work and not just like typing away at a laptop and being a thinky person, like people who benefit our neighborhood is like making the best tacos, making the papoosas that are so good, as opposed to like anything you could get in a ghost kitchen.

34:11 I'm happy to raise this in on your show because there was like a true need that I felt writing this piece where I did not want that broader context to get lost, even if I personally did not feel like I was always the best voice for some of these issues. I wanted to bring them in as best I could.

34:28 I think that this is such an important subject, right? Because I feel like it's obviously one that has been dealt with in science fiction, whether we look at your novel wrong way and the way it deals with this hidden labor and the attempt to hide it away and how so many of these tech products really depend on it.

34:43 You know, we've had a bunch of reporting over the past few years about how generative AI has relied heavily on, you know, these contract workers to kind of smooth over the results and help determine the outputs and these things, but that kind of escapes the narrative, right? And obviously, in the piece that you wrote, you spoke to Alex Rivera, who is the director of the science fiction film Sleep Dealer.

35:03 He was on the show like way back in the early days of Tech Won't Save Us Now. It was a good reminder, actually, when I saw it there. But, you know, again, his film deals with this notion of basically you have all these workers in Mexico and they are kind of like teleworking, like kind of jacking into the system to control robots across the border in the United States.

35:22 And like, as you're saying, right, like when you're looking at these robots driving around the street, you know, immediately contrasting that with ICE running around and kind of like grabbing people off the street just to try to get them out of the country and get them into detention camps and things like that, it's hard not to look at that and see exactly the types of things that you're talking about, where it's like, it's not that you don't need humans to do this work, but you're really trying to find the way to use the technology to make it so those humans do not need to be physically in the location where the work needs to be done, whether it's through teleoperation as you're talking about

35:58 with the delivery robots and the autonomous cars and stuff like that, but you know, any number of other things as well.

36:04 Yeah. And this is one reason that I feel like pointing to technology and techno-capitalism or whatever you'd want to call it, pointing this out as something unique is critical because there is something about the way that modern technology is alienating human connections to each other. That when I encounter a delivery robot on the street, I am having a human-to-human connection in an incredibly alienated form.

36:33 Because there is a human who is steering this thing. I will never look that person in the eyes. I will never get to see them. But it is still a human who is interacting with me. The Waymo's, those people watch setting waypoints, as Waymo would put it, setting waypoints. Like it's no, they're navigating these systems.

36:56 The teleops workers, who the company pretends to not exist, who are navigating the Waymo's, are interacting with me as a passenger in an incredibly alienated way. So this is something that we have to identify as a unique, perilous condition exacerbated by contemporary technology. What I love about Alex's film and you know, talking to him, he's he's an incredible person to talk to, he's very thoughtful and has thought about this stuff for years.

37:29 He kept bringing the conversation back to like, what would it take for this technology to be good? I loved that like needling here where it's like, yeah, you don't want to pick oranges under the hot sun. Like, who would want to do that? And he said this to me, and I thought, you're right. I guess maybe teleops is a better job than picking oranges under the sun.

37:49 But then there are other ways that could be horrible. There are just like so many ways it could be horrible. It could be horrible because of capitalism. But if we lived in a political system designed for justice and progress and human rights, and all of that was put forward and prioritized, maybe it's possible that these delivery robots are adding a benefit to the city somehow.

38:12 Maybe they are protecting workers, protecting, say, a bike courier from risk of injury. I mean, there are so many ways that you could do that, but they're not built right now to protect workers. They're like, they absolutely are not. Like none of this technology is designed to like make the roads safer or make our lives easier.

38:33 It's just the typical ways of exploitation that we've come to know for decades now.

38:40 When I was reading your piece and you were talking to Rash, the Cocoa Robotics co-founder, I believe it was in that section. And he was kind of saying, or maybe it was in another interview he gave that you quoted, that these robots would like get cars off the road, right? You know, the delivery robots.

38:54 And it took me back to like how Uber was saying that 10, 15 years ago, Travis Kalnik was saying it, and how that was never actually what Uber did, right? But it was a way to promote it. And of course, you mentioned in the piece how the scooter companies were like saying the same thing. But then even recently, I saw this headline referring to Waymo being like, oh, self-driving cars could be the future of public transit.

39:15 And I was like, this is another conversation we had like a decade ago, and we're like, no, this is not gonna work out. And so it just like blows my mind to uh see these things come back again and again.

39:25 And you know Paris as best as anyone that this is like an individualistic solution. It's not like they're not actually creating like public transportation. I mean, the thing that's so funny about these delivery robots is they, as far as I know, they only make one delivery per stop. Maybe they can be built in a way to like make multiple deliveries.

39:43 But like if you have maybe a delivery driver, they might be making multiple stops per restaurant. And so there's just this matter of efficiency here. If it's like someone on a bike and like in their basket fit a few things in there, but it it's just why don't we just have public transportation? If you're against like cars in the road, there are so many solutions that require public investment and community support.

40:12 But this is just about like serving one person's needs at a time. So it's even like the just the nature of delivery annoys me. It's like, what are you doing in your home ordering like some pad tie? Why do you need to be served that way? I really feel like people need to get past their COVID way of life.

40:33 I certainly writing this piece, I used to have like Sunday takeout because you know, Sunday is a lazy day. I don't the grocery store near me is closed. It's it's like things like that. And I used to have that like not every Sunday, but pretty regularly that Sunday in order to take it. Now I'm like, no, you will get out of your house, you will walk to the restaurant, maybe you'll eat it at the park or something, but you are not going to get it delivered.

40:54 Like I'm so and yes, I know the great Twitter X blue sky debate about this privileged belief that you can't have delivery, or like, is it able to say you shouldn't order Instacart? I mean, it's like, okay, I need to address this my take here, and you're welcome to think what you will of me for believing this.

41:19 But there are disabled Instacart workers, there are disabled Uber drivers. There it's like disability takes many forms. And yes, if this is something that like you absolutely cannot, I'm not going to have a problem with you as an individual if you have to order from Amazon. If you have to order Instacart, go do that.

41:36 Do what you need. But I am saying that many people are probably participating in systems that they don't agree with for reasons that they don't need to. And for those people, I'm speaking to you. Please enjoy where you live. If you do live in a city, go outside, eat in a restaurant, be there in person.

41:58 It's an experience like you should you should be able to enjoy these experiences. We might look back on these days and wish we could still could. So do it while you can.

42:07 I feel like I've been dragged into that debate so many times and like I'm very much on the same page. Like, you know, we should have those available for people who need them, for people who need delivery, all that kind of stuff. But the expectation that like the vast majority of the public should be doing these things is like just completely mind-boggling to me.

42:25 I I've actually never used a food delivery app in my life. Like I refuse to do it. You know, I've ordered pizza delivery and stuff before, but that's like a much more rare thing. Even today, I usually go pick it up if I if I do something like that. I was curious, you know, as we start to kind of wind down our conversation, we didn't talk a ton about Waymo yet.

42:45 And I was wondering, you know, because another piece of what you were writing about was how, you know, around the same time all this was happening, the geofense in LA for Waymo had expanded into your neighborhood, so you were seeing them more often. What is the experience? And you were kind of talking about this when you were talking about being kind of blocked in and not being able to parallel park, but what is the experience of running into these vehicles and where there's not a driver in them, usually?

43:08 I know sometimes they do have humans inside, but like, do people actually take care of them? Like, are they clean inside? Are they grimy? Like, what is this like?

43:17 I definitely got in some grimy Waymo's, and that shocked me. That actually, I felt like, okay, here I'm being handed something to put in my face. Like, I just like walk like the first, because I hadn't really ordered them. They had just expanded the GFNS to include my neighborhood. The first one I ordered was just so dirty, and I couldn't get over like how it was just like so disgusting.

43:42 And again, it's something that like I'm sure the Waymo defenders, the Waymo fanboys be like, well, it's that humans are disgusting. Waymo's are born clean, or you know, no they're thinking there. It's like, okay, but you're designed to serve humans, so you have to kind of like accommodate the irregularities.

44:00 Of cleanliness of different humans if you're going to be like serving them. So it was just so funny to me. And I took a few and I'm just like, wow, they really, and that to me, I mean, in the piece, I kind of laugh about it as like dirty Waymo's. But like, if you think about it, how does this thing scale if they aren't even like cleaning between passengers already?

44:20 How does it scale? It doesn't. And they have a few little things like they'll fine you a hundred bucks if they find you didn't you left a Waymo kind of dirty. And I don't really know how, because it would mean you need someone monitoring these cars. And it doesn't feel like they've hired enough people monitoring the cars.

44:38 So, like every time you see a story about a Waymo driving the wrong way on a one-way street, or if you see one that's just like creating chaos, just understand that is happening because the people who are monitoring these cars are probably way, way, way over capacity. And the solution to this, which I'm sure Waymo is adjusting to right now, is like hire some contract workers.

45:05 I don't know where they are. I assume they they are in the Philippines. I couldn't quite get a confirmation there, but it there are some contract companies that they are going through, like cognizant, I think is one of them. But they just don't have enough remote operators. So when they're saying like we don't have remote operators, yes, that's a lie.

45:23 I would say the response to that is you don't have enough because you are still messing up quite a bit. Not to the extent of an accident, but it's like, okay, you're not on the highways yet. And do we want, do we want to like try the possibility that someone is going to die because of a Waymo? Like, do we want to get up to that point where it's like, oh, finally someone died because of a Waymo?

45:44 I'm saying this is gonna be me. I'm sure it's like, I don't know, like, I don't, like, I know. We don't want to risk it. Like, you already have this like Rube Goldberg contraption of human labor and what you call automation coming together on the road as a charade, cars that aren't clean. You can't scale because you'd have to clean these cars eventually.

46:07 Because, like, again, with like the dog, the dog bags, like, I think that's probably like going to be a thing that people are just like, this could be like the act of resistance, what my my friend said is like the dog bag on the cocoa robot, the dog bags left in the Waymo's, like just dirty, disgusting Waymo's.

46:24 You, if you get in one disgusting Waymo, you're going to be really hesitant to go into another one. Like you absolutely are. You're gonna be like, yeah, I could take this car to downtown because it's a little bit cheaper than an Uber. If you want to take an Uber, it's usually cheaper than an Uber. But there is a risk that's gonna be really, really disgusting in there.

46:43 Yeah, like the human will at least pay attention to what's going on in the car. And it's like, I feel like you get in some taxis now, and I'm sure it's similar with Uber, and like they're offering you drinks and snacks and all this kind of stuff, I guess, to get a good rating. And it's like, I'm good.

46:57 Like, I'm just looking to get where I'm going. You hold on to your food, like just take me where I want to go. Like, it's fine. Yeah, I don't know. I I just think this is wild. And I I feel like the one I'm particularly worried about now is like, you know, obviously we saw the Uber system kill somebody back in 2018, and that essentially killed it.

47:16 We saw the GM Cruz one drag a woman in San Francisco, and that was like the death knell for it. And now it's like this Tesla one, it seems like only a matter of time before that kills somebody.

47:27 And I would recommend everyone go back to the case regarding that Uber and how they just scapegoated the assistant driver. And it's so appalling that this is another potential as soon as people realize how many humans are involved in this automation chain, those barely paid workers are gonna get scapegoated somehow.

47:51 Because if you have like this sort of like air traffic control type role that you're getting like 14 bucks an hour for, like again, I'm just kind of like speculating out here out loud, but like that's where you get the scapegoating too. Because at the end of the day, these these people who make this technology, they believe their own like fantasies that the technology is neutral.

48:14 They believe if there is a problem, it's just the problem is the humans, it's the human touch. Even though humans, that's where you get the care. That's where you get someone who is going to put that extra labor in, perhaps at the expense of themselves, because they know what the consequence of an accident actually is.

48:35 AI does not have feelings, does not have empathy, does not have a civil sense of being part of a society where I mean, a lot of this piece has kind of reminded me when I'm driving. For as much as people complain about cars, complain about car culture, when I'm driving in LA, yes, I get those like road rage here and there.

48:58 But I also see a lot of people just expressing like being part of a society in a really complicated way where you do let people pass. Because if you don't, if you're selfish on the road, you both get hurt. You have to be constantly kind of like making exceptions for people just to like make it from one point to the other as a driver.

49:20 Totally. And I think throughout this conversation, you've really laid out a lot of the issues with this vision that these companies have, right? For for what this future should be and why we should want to adopt it and why we shouldn't, right? Why we should try to stop this thing in its tracks and make sure that these companies can't take over our roads and our sidewalks and our restaurants and how we eat and all these sorts of things, right?

49:40 You know, this is a really dystopian vision that serves a very narrow idea of, like you were saying earlier, optimization and how they're making money and all these sorts of things. So I wonder, you know, to end off our conversation, you were talking about how this is a vision that they really tried to push during the pandemic that was based on very real desires to want to limit contacts because we didn't want to spread this virus to other people and to infect them before vaccines were around and all that kind of stuff.

50:08 But are there opportunities, do you think? Like, is this future, is this vision that they have locked in, do we still have opportunities to sidetrack it once again and make sure that they can't foist it on us? What do you think there? Is there hope?

50:21 My kind of sense here, what we're going to see is what we see now with these like dirty, discarded lime scooters. They're not as omnipresent as they were. You see them every once in a while, and they just look like no one's picked one up in five years and they're just like covered in grime. So I kind of think you'll see these the money will run out eventually.

50:46 Waymo cannot scale. Like it just can't. And it's ridiculous that any tech reporter who is pretending this is the future has got to stop. I'm I'm sorry, I'm like so angry at like saying this, but I was like, I listened to this episode of hard fork that like, and I got into it in my piece, but it's like, you've got to be kidding me.

51:04 This technology cannot scale. We have to stop pretending. And as soon as we stop pretending, that might give us an opportunity to claw back a little bit to reality because this is just a charade for your not really well thought out written in two hours, posted online reportage that just like carries their like PR for them.

51:25 The Waymo's are a joke. If it was actually useful, if it was really a technology that they wanted widespread to be beneficial, they would be looking at putting it in cars in an affordable way. Because I will agree that the sensors that Waymo has offer incredible benefits for detection of pedestrians, detection of possible collisions.

51:48 Why don't we put these in our existing vehicles now and make this affordable? Like, why don't we have like a grand measure for that? That we could have my old Ford focus from 2013. If I could have like a little bit of those like Waymo sensors that could let me know that like someone's on my left and I they're in my blind spot, I love that.

52:08 But I don't have that because it would be like crazy expensive. Like, look, why don't we start with that? If this is such great technology, why don't we start with the existing systems that we have and see about like rethinking those instead of creating this farce? I mean, that's not how Google does things.

52:24 Google does things as like a spectacle. And I point out that like Google does things like Street View as a spectacle when in fact it is kind of like ushering all of society into using Google infrastructure for alerts for wildfires or tornadoes, or like, I mean, just like infrastructure in general being routed through Google's proprietary infrastructure.

52:52 These are the trade-offs here. So I guess I'm not like a skeptic about the technology itself. It has its benefits. I'm a complete skeptic of fraudulent charades on the street level creating difficulty and creating bad vibes. I mean, it's like bad vibes here in Los Angeles.

53:14 I hear you, Joanne. I I think we need to stop these things in their tracks. Maybe we also need to form the uh Hard Fork Haters Club to have more regular meetings on that one. But I would say, you know, to me, like you're saying with the scooters, I feel like one of the main reasons that these Waymo's and even the delivery bots got like a new lease on life in the past couple of years is yes, because of the COVID experience, but also because of all this AI hype.

53:37 And I think we all know that that is gonna die down at some point, and it's gonna take some of the money that's fueling these AI driving visions along with it, and hopefully we can kind of reassert some control over uh what is going on there at that point. Joanne, it's always fantastic to talk with you, to have you on the show.

53:52 I can't wait to see what you're working on next. And I know you have an event coming up in LA that you wanted to let people know about. So, what's the details there?

53:59 Oh, sure. Thank you. So if you're around on November 1st at the Philosophical Research Society, I'm going to be giving a talk called What Comes After Social Media. And it's a talk that's based on all the things that have changed since Lurking was published in 2020. And I see a decline in social media, and here's what I think is is happening, uh, what's on the horizon for us.

54:23 So that's that'll be at PRS November 1st at 5 p.m.

54:28 And we can put the link in the show notes, and maybe that's something we need to talk about on the show in the future sometime. Always great to have you, and thanks again for taking the time.

54:36 Oh, it's great talking with you, Paris. Thank you.

54:40 Joanne McNeil is a freelance writer and the author of Wrong Way and Lurking. Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with the Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kylie Houston. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

54:54 You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening. Make sure to come back next week.