The article makes it seem like they are going to start competing with Uber right this moment. In reality the body of the article indicates that a human driver will have to be employed and that only Waymo employees and their friends will be using them. So in other words, it will be more expensive than Uber and it will only be active in an area where Uber drivers would rather not be anyway.

This terrifies me. Uber is a very good source of income for a lot of people. So google is going to run Waymo at a loss out of their endless pockets and starve thousands of people of essential income? And we are all supposed to dangle on the edge of our seats while we wait to see whether or not this task is within the capabilities of our current technology, with all these people’s livelihoods at stake? This is fucking bullshit. There aren’t good jobs to transition into at the same skill level because of automation and outsourcing. Expecting everyone to go to college, let alone go to college and become programmers, is mental gymnastics levels of rationalization. Rationalizing away the difficult and uncomfortable question of whether or not technology is leading is to a place we want to be and what we can do a about it.

One job after another will disappear and don’t believe for a second that programming is safe. They used to say it about lots of writing tasks that are now automated by gtp2. I would bet most “journalists” could be automated by gtp2 because most of their readership doesn’t look for or recognize high-level order or coherency or even truth anyway. And don’t for even one split second try to tell yourself that high level order and logic are off the table for robots.