Waymo Trouble Ahead

Ben Wildsmith 

I had a quintessential 2025 moment yesterday. My car was in for its MOT, so when it was ready to collect, I called a taxi.

The driver was a friendly guy who had the conversational skills that mark out all good cabbies. We started with the weather, obviously that’s the law, but were soon on to crippling rises in motor insurance and how difficult it is for working drones like he and I to keep up with the cost of living.

We agreed, though, that we’re lucky to have jobs, however tight things are.

We’d both seen recent interviews with experts on AI that suggested mass unemployment could be round the corner as everyone from accountants to music producers are replaced by a technology that trains itself and never goes on the sick.

‘In three or four years, there’ll be driverless taxis,’ my new friend worried. ‘I’ve done this for years, God knows what I’ll do.’

Radio 4

Wishing him luck, I picked up my jalopy and turned on the radio – Radio 4 so as to maximise my rage for these columns.

The very first item on the news announced that the American subsidiary of Google, Waymo, would be launching in London next year. So much for my pal’s hopes of three- or four-years’ grace.

A representative of the company was on the programme to field questions, all of which related to safety. There was no need to worry, he assured the presenter. For the first six months the cars would be supervised by a driver as they collected real-world conditions on the roads and fed it into the AI model that would guide the vehicle once drivers were dispensed with.

Well, that’s a relief, isn’t it? Waymo might be eliminating an entire sector of UK employment, but they’ll try not to kill their customers in the process.

As our politics sinks into toxic rancour, essentially reduced to a choice between scapegoats, we are facing monumental change that is proceeding with little or no democratic input.

Ethical

When did you last hear a UK politician engage with the ethical and social issues thrown up by the onset of artificial intelligence?

As they squabble over who can appear toughest on relatively small numbers of undocumented immigrants, foreign companies are preparing to unleash unprecedented job cuts without a word of dissent.

For ordinary people, who can’t afford the fetishised, boutique experiences beloved of the wealthy, activities like shopping and eating out are becoming dehumanised and animalistic.

We queue up to scan our own groceries, filmed from all angles, before being released from the shop’s automatic gates once our purchases have been verified. Our clothes arrive without us trying them on, hurled into the garden by overworked delivery drivers who will then pick them up when they don’t fit.

How long until they are replaced? We bark our lunch requests into a machine before picking up the food at the next window and eating it in silence, alone in the car park.

It doesn’t sound much like progress to me, and I can find nobody in politics who seems even remotely concerned.

Keir Starmer, of course, is convinced that siting data centres in the UK to serve the needs of AI will save our economy. As with  absolutely everything  the Prime Minister supports, this is short-term thinking that lacks any ethical framework on which we can rely to mitigate societal harm.

Unemployment 

Automation and AI are striking at the heart of how we value ourselves as human beings. The social cost of unemployment that wrecked industrial communities in the 1980s is now coming for everyone, and unless democratic control is imposed over the owners of this technology, we will be entirely at their mercy.

Astonishingly, Stephen Kinnock, the Minister for Care (!), announced yesterday that specialist job advisers will be deployed to GP surgeries to ‘help’ the sick and disabled back into work.

On the precipice of work becoming obsolete for much of the population, the intellectual pygmies who govern us are dreaming up ways to harass us into jobs when we are unwell. Ask Chat GPT how well that’s likely to go. You won’t be discussing it with your cabbie for much longer.