The Secret Lives of Robot Taxis

For the past few nights, I’ve concerned myself with the private lives of autonomous vehicles.

It started when I read a news story about a San Francisco apartment complex whose residents were repeatedly awoken at 4 a.m. by honking self-driving taxis. The building overlooks an open-air parking lot that Waymo recently leased to store its vehicles. In the wee hours of the morning—between ferrying home overserved bar crawlers and picking up commuters during the morning rush hour—dozens of the autonomous white sedans fill the lot, power down, and wait to be summoned. Sometimes, too many awaken at the same time and back up while trying to make their way to the exit, only to find the lanes clogged by their brethren. Angling for position, the taxis engage in a series of polite reversals and turns that quickly gives way to gridlock. Now hemmed in, the cars begin to negotiate their movements, each one offering a gentle horn honk to signal its presence; before long, they’re producing a symphony of toots, turn signals, and low-speed shuffling.

[Read: It’s a weird time for driverless cars]

The spectacle was captured on video by Sophia Tung, an engineer whose home looks down on the lot. She first noticed the Waymos late last month, when they colonized the lot without warning, their ambient beeps and scoots so omnipresent that she heard them in her dreams. Tung was mesmerized by the cars’ movements. “I found myself just staring at it for 10 minutes at a time, watching these machines figure each other out,” she told me. “It was like watching a fish tank.” Her amusement quickly turned into a side project: Tung set up a webcam and started livestreaming the view from her window, adding some chill music as a soundtrack. She told me that she had started the stream, titled "LoFi Waymo Hip Hop Radio ???? Self Driving Taxi Depot Shenanigans to Relax/Study To," for herself—it was a fun thing to have on in the background while she worked—but it quickly became popular. A weekend editor at The Verge found the stream, then a German publication, then local news outlets and fellow YouTubers.

The stream made for a perfect viral story, mixing low-stakes neighborly frustration and humorous video with a more serious undertone: Here was an almost too on-the-nose encapsulation of a modern tech dystopia, where humans are tortured by corporate-owned robot vehicles that drive in circles, honking at the night sky. The existence of Tung’s stream was quickly picked up by outlets such as Good Morning America and The New York Times, both of which focused on the disturbance and quoted sleepless residents plagued by the noise. Waymo eventually caught wind of the stream and released an update to prevent the vehicles from honking.

But they still drive around in the lot. It’s like poetry in motion, and people love it. Tung’s stream now regularly receives hundreds of concurrent viewers at all hours of the day. Fans have reached out to tell her they’ve become “obsessed” with its soothing rhythms. According to Sophia, every night from 2 to 5 a.m., the cars trickle out of the lot and head off to a second location to charge; the lot reliably begins to fill back up around 8 p.m., on weekdays, or 11 p.m. on weekends. Tung noticed that some stream viewers began to assign the Waymos human or animal characteristics, joking that certain cars have personalities. “I spend a lot of time wondering, What do I even call them?” Tung said of the taxis. “They sort of look like sheep, so I started calling them a flock. Then others argued that they’re more like bugs or ants. More recently, my stream chat has begun assigning them genders and terms of endearment.”

There’s a definite novelty to watching self-driving technology at work. The cars, which use radar light detection to map the road and sense other objects and vehicles, are, in essence, wordlessly conversing with one another as they shuffle around the lot. The technology, which is still quite new, sometimes produces awkward, stilted interactions between taxis—much like when two people on a sidewalk try to step around each other, but keep choosing the same direction. It’s fascinating to watch their maneuvering as the outgrowth of a complex system negotiating with itself. Tung told me that numerous Waymo engineers have come into her stream to thank her for broadcasting. “When you’re building a product that’s so wide-ranging and has so many teams, oftentimes people working on the software don’t see the end product,” she said.

[John Hendrickson: What I found in San Francisco]

But the true delight is voyeuristic. Watching the Waymos circle the lot under the cover of darkness—and occasionally getting stuck in an endless loop—scratches a childish itch, akin to the fantasy of watching one’s toys come alive at night. In one video, the cars, bathed in taillight red and trying to exit, give off an aggressive vibe. In others, they seem clumsy. What do robots do when we can’t see them? Tung’s webcam answers the question. The stream makes it easy to spin up fictionalized, anthropomorphized yarns about the cars, because it feels like we’ve caught them in a private moment.

To watch these inanimate objects putter about is, in many ways, to experience the future in all its messy contradictions. The Waymo-parking-lot disruption epitomizes the unintended consequences of a still-new technology and a complex system when it interacts with the physical world—in this case, an alert feature for the roads was deployed with no concept of how it might trigger a honk tsunami when the cars gathered at their depots. The long-promised self-driving future is here, and it is equal parts wondrous and mundane. That the cars drive themselves is a small miracle; that they drive endlessly through the night in halting circles in parking lots is the stuff of satire.

“People have grandiose thoughts of the future,” Tung said near the end of our conversation. “You wake up and think one day you’ll be living in the future, but the part everyone misses is it takes millions of man-hours to build the future. You have to wait. But then, once it’s here, it becomes mundane. As soon as you live in the future, it fades out of sight.” In other words, the future doesn’t happen overnight until, in a San Francisco parking lot, it does.