I read this story (see below) about two teens in San Mateo, California, who were riding in a Waymo robotaxi and started shooting Orbeez out the windows with water guns. The car pulled over in a parking lot on its own and waited. Police showed up and picked the teens up right there.
That's the part that gets me. This isn't just a car that drives itself. It's a car that's always watching, always recording, and this time it decided to turn its own passengers in.
Waymo says the cameras are there for safety, lost items, and keeping the car clean. Maybe that's mostly true. But this is a reminder that every ride in one of these things is fully monitored, by cameras and by computers, and sometimes by an actual person reviewing the footage.
Is that good or bad? Hard to say. In this case, it caught two teens acting like idiots and probably kept things from getting worse. And there's an argument that self-driving cars are safer here in a specific way: they can't get into a police chase. No high-speed pursuit, no car full of people running from cops. That part could actually make roads safer for everyone, teens included.
But it's still strange to think about self-driving cars as an extension of policing. Robotaxis are only going to get more common, and lawmakers are already working on rules to make them easier to build and deploy. If a car can decide to pull over and wait for police on its own, what else might it decide to do without asking you first?
This isn't a new idea to me. I've seen movies build entire plots around this, machines that watch their passengers and make decisions for them. I, Robot came to mind almost immediately, with a self-driving car making a call that changes everything for the person inside. It used to feel like a movie problem. Now it's a real one.
Taxis are one thing, since a robotaxi is a shared ride you step into for a single trip. But what if this becomes standard in regular electric cars, the ones people actually own and drive themselves? Not a car you rent for a ride, but the car sitting in your own driveway, deciding on its own when to report you.
I don't have an answer for any of this. I just wanted to put it into words and wonder what the future looks like.
