“I've been anti-human driver for about 50 years now. Have you ever seen a human drive a car including yourself? We're not that good.”
Stephen Dubner
4:30Autonomous vehicles have already crossed from science fiction into mundane reality — Waymo robotaxis now operate in 10 U.S. cities and millions of Americans have already ridden in them — yet most people still haven't grasped how fast this transition is moving. This episode traces the origin story of the driverless car from DARPA's chaotic 2004 desert race through Google's secret Prius fleet, following the rivalrous engineers — Sebastian Thrun, Chris Urmson, and Anthony Levandowski — whose competing philosophies about risk and speed would later collide with federal consequences. For any professional navigating a world being reshaped by AI and automation, this is a rare, character-driven account of exactly how transformative technology actually gets built — not by inevitable progress, but by specific people making specific bets — with the second half forcing a harder question: who gets hurt when the future arrives unevenly?
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