Name: The Two Opposite Futures of Self-Driving Cars
Uploaded: 2025-05-30T01:57:35.000Z
Duration: 12 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

So, a couple weeks ago, I clicked on this video that just blew my mind.

To-infinitive

Okay, this guy's name is Kyle, and he's calling for a ride.

Kyle is the CEO of the company that makes these cars, but this isn't just some private company demo.

Dozens of people across San Francisco are calling for rides and finding nobody else inside.

I'll admit, you know I'm an optimist, but I was getting a little bit cynical about self-driving cars.

Like, it does feel like every few years they say that self-driving cars will be here in another few years.

But after watching this video, I wondered, are they finally here?

So I took a deep dive into that question over the past few months.

Not just into driverless taxis, but also all of the other driverless stuff that I'd heard about, trying to piece together the big picture here.

I actually ended up in San Francisco interviewing Kyle himself.

It's very clear that this is something different.

The answer that I found to whether self-driving cars are actually here is yes.

They just don't look like what I thought.

It's not that single go-anywhere sci-fi version.

It's actually two very different approaches, two competing ideas of what the near future of self-driving might look like, fighting it out on the road.

And our lives are about to look very different, depending on who wins.

I live in New York, but all of those self-driving cars, they're in San Francisco, so that's where I've gotta go.

This conversation isn't about some binary switch from us driving cars to cars just driving themselves.

It's more like this, a long road from one to the other with a lot of messy middle.

And we've been driving down this road for decades.

Back in the mid-1900s, we got basic cruise control, where you could set a speed.

And in the early 2000s, we got help from our cars in key moments, like emergency braking.

And then we got more continuous support, like lane centering or adaptive cruise control.

It would match the car in front of you, right?

And as we got farther down this road, we started to see where we were headed more clearly.

And we began to categorize the journey into levels of self-drivingness.

These are the levels you might hear about today.

Level two is newer, like highway piloting systems.

This is where we are now with the limit of most cars we can easily buy.

With all of the levels that we've gotten to so far, humans are still very much in charge.

The idea is that we'd first just be monitoring the car, and then it would be fully in charge, but only in certain situations or areas.

And then the last level would be cars in charge anywhere, anytime.

I knew that we were here, and that lots of companies were working hard on these.

But those self-driving taxis, the ones that are already picking people up, they're here.

Now that you know the levels and where we are now, here's the really key thing to understand about where we're headed.

A lot of the headlines that I see are about the effort to get to that last sci-fi level.

Like, I don't know how long level five is gonna take, but a lot of the predictions kind of seem like bullshit.

Instead, the interesting fight right now is actually just within the level we're already on.

Full self-driving, but within constraints.

For example, training vehicles to drive anywhere that doesn't have too much complexity, like just on highways.

Or in more complex areas, but they have to be trained there.

You can't just drop them into a new city.

In other words, the fight for the future of self-driving isn't just happening this way.

And that's the fight I want to talk about.

I'm about to go interview the CEO of Cruise, and I'm gonna take a not-self-driving car to get there because it's really hard to get into one of those self-driving cars.

The company I'm going to visit, Cruise, is an example of one of the two big visions for how to use self-driving cars within our current level.

To understand these visions, you have to understand the two big divides within the big picture of self-driving cars.

Or more complex, but geographically constrained?

I know I introduced him as just like this guy, but Kyle is a really big deal.

I've seen the video of you getting into the driverless car on the public street for the first time.

That was the first time, and so I was pretty nervous.

What have you learned from the results of that test so far?

The things we're learning are all the weird nuances between humans and machines that we take for granted.

Do you want to tell me what's the most interesting?

So sometimes people use this service to come home from restaurants or even bars.

Maybe you have a few drinks and that makes you sleepy, and so we've had multiple people fall asleep.

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The Two Opposite Futures of Self-Driving Cars

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