Setting fire to self-driving cars won't help build a better future

The torching of a Waymo driverless car in San Francisco last week says as much about us as it does about the technology that was destroyed

Image: Midjourney

I must confess that I was shocked to read about the torching of a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco this past week. As someone who studies and writes about the complex relationships between technology and society, the incident — and the responses to it — shouldn’t have surprised me. Yet I found myself getting surprisingly angry on three accounts as I read about it.

On the evening of February 10, a driverless Waymo that wasn’t carrying passengers stopped when it encountered a street party in San Francisco. By some accounts the crowd and fireworks around it confused the car’s navigation system, leading to it remaining where it was.

The spark that led to what happened next isn’t clear. But at some point people started to mob and vandalize the stationary car.

Posted videos show the car being battered with whatever people could lay their hands on, a side window being smashed, a lit firework being lobed into the interior, and the car bursting into flame.

It’s easy to spin a narrative of anti-technology feelings around this incident. There’s been growing sentiment in San Francisco that self-driving cars aren’t welcome in the city — spurred on by a recent incident involving a pedestrian and a Cruise self-driving vehicle (the company subsequently stopped operating in San Francisco) and a Waymo vehicle hitting a cyclist. Even before this there were reports of growing frustration around the presence of autonomous vehicles on the city’s streets, and targeted action by activists immobilizing self-driving cars.

Yet framing the incident as reflecting a public backlash against a technology that wasn’t asked for and isn’t wanted is simply too convenient. It’s a narrative that makes for a good story if you’re looking for quick media attention. And it seductively strokes the confirmation biases of anyone who has an agenda that involves trashing new technologies.

But to take a single datapoint and insinuate that this is a reflection of society’s unwillingness to be guinea pigs in a social experiment is both lazy and dangerous.

This is the first aspect of the incident and how it was reported that got me angry. The second was the the sheer mindlessness of the mob’s attack against the car.

Without more evidence it’s hard to say exactly what transpired here, or why. But what we do know points less toward a rational and reasoned protest against self-driving technologies, and more toward a mob mentality where people were given social license to smash stuff in the moment — and the car just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s one thing to be critical of the introduction of self-driving cars. It’s another thing entirely to embrace the willful destruction of something, simply because others are doing it and it makes you feel good.

This willingness to “other” a piece of technology, and then use this as a justification to smash it, troubles me. It taps into a part of our collective psyche that revels in the sense of identity and belonging that results from collective violence against something (or someone) else.

This is not a good basis on which to build a shared future.

The third thing that angered me was a combination of the above. Actions like the torching of the Waymo have a disturbing way of spreading when supported by a narrative that seems to validate them — especially when fanned by the media (social or otherwise). And that could be disastrous for the responsible and beneficial development of self-driving cars, as well as other autonomous technologies.

How long will it be before another mob trashes a self-driving car, empowered by a narrative that hints at this being OK? And how long until a passenger gets caught up in the middle of the fray and is seriously injured.

I suspect most writers and academics speculating about a social backlash against autonomous vehicles would claim they’re not endorsing what happened in San Francisco. Yet by weaving a narrative around this being a reaction against a technology that threatens people and by hinting that it confirms self-driving cars should not be on the road, they are legitimizing such behavior.

I sincerely hope we don’t see a wave of people vandalizing autonomous vehicles. But I worry that the the barriers preventing this are fragile, and it won’t take much to pull them down. If they do fall, I’m pretty sure this won’t stop at cars. Anything autonomous will become fair game — drones, food delivery robots, AI-powered info-stations, and much more besides.

Of course, laws and legal actions would kick in fast if this became a thing (although in the Waymo case there’s already talk of using prosecutions to put the company on trial). But not fast enough I suspect to avoid serious harm to the responsible development of autonomous technologies.

One of those consequences would likely be companies abandoning work on autonomous tech — a win for the opposition, but hardly one for people and communities that could benefit from these technologies. Another would be development that is more secretive, less open, and far less accountable, than it currently is.

But the one that worries me the most is developers being forced to build protective measures into their autonomous tech. What this might look like I’m not sure — but I blanch at the thought of autonomous cars, drones, and delivery bots, that can give as good as they get.

Hopefully this is just a dystopian future-tech fever dream. But it does worry me that a combination of mob mentality, lazy narratives, and a surfeit of confirmation bias, will make it harder to support the responsible development of technologies like self-driving cars that, if done right, could have a positive impact on society.

Of course “done right” is open to interpretation here, and it may be that the world is indeed not ready for autonomous vehicles. There’s a lot that still needs to be explored, discussed, debated, and grappled with around the safe and successful development of the technology. I get that — it’s what I do for a living.

In the meantime, incidents like the one in San Francisco tell us more about who we are as humans than about the technologies we’re developing. It suggests that, for all of our sophistication, we’re still susceptible to running with the crowd and damning the consequences — and then telling ourselves that it’s OK because, deep down, we were making a statement against the incursion of unwanted technologies into society.

Yet despite the tortuous apologetics that I’m already beginning to see hints of around this incident, setting fire to self-driving cars won't help build a better future — no matter how much some might like to believe it will.