Automation is Political Accelerant
Driverless cars will create as many problems as they solve
I’ve been thinking a lot about Andrew Yang recently. Remember him? He seems to have disappeared Ísince COVID, but back then, before everything got really crazy, he had a real moment talking about center-left politics, UBI, and automation. Looking back, listening to him talk about the plight of American truckers who would soon be confronted with irrelevance, I can’t help but notice how even his pessimistic predictions sound so naive now that we have begun to enter the era of the robotaxi. However bad Yang thought automation would be, I think it's going to be a whole lot worse, or at least wilder. As code and cameras take control of travel, and the only wheel that really matters—the steering wheel—finally comes off, we will be forced to reconcile with realities that, until now, have been papered over. The result? Our culture will serve as the crash-test dummy, crushed under forces far too mechanical for any form of political correctness to cushion.
As the past few weeks have shown, the coming conflicts in the age of automation are unlikely to feature truck drivers attacking superchargers or parking their rigs in the middle of a highway. Workers protesting job losses can usually be pacified by simply providing a new, viable career opportunity, and that’s precisely what many companies focused on re-industrializing manufacturing are doing right now. While there will be an uncomfortable transition period, I’m not worried about the dads who just want to provide for their families slipping into massive destruction or acting against their own interests. Some blue-collar boys might mourn the loss of trucking culture, having to step back from the “thin yellow line,” but most will be happy to be put to work. The same goes for white-collar office workers who may finally see their quiet dreams come true and be relieved of the endless, excruciating days in Excel. I’m reminded of The Company Men, where Ben Affleck’s character is fired from a shuttered shipbuilding firm, works construction to make ends meet, and eventually joins a shipbuilding startup. Serious men provide; they find ways to be productive and adapt to their new reality. Sabotaging a supercharger station might feel cathartic, but it’s not in anyone’s long-term interest.
What worries me, and what must be increasingly worrying to the companies racing to automate everything, is the behavior of those who cannot slot in as white-collar executives or blue-collar laborers. These are the people who burn towns during BLM riots, set up “autonomous zones” in the name of peace that end up ruled by neighborhood warlords, or slash priceless paintings to protest for Palestinians. They do not care that destruction undermines their stated cause; they want an excuse to destroy something beautiful. This same crowd recently torched Waymos in downtown Los Angeles. There was no reason to burn the cars, no coherent political program, not even a loose ideology—only the urge to wreck a machine that embodied competence they could never match. Orwell saw the pattern in The Road to Wigan Pier: many who claim to love the poor simply hate the rich. So it will go with this contingent; they will pretend to defend the temporarily displaced, but their real aim is to lash out against anyone capable of building, a living reminder of their own inadequacy.
This reality will become harder to ignore with each passing year. As more footage circulates of people destroying robots purely for destruction’s sake, the companies that cherish their autonomous fleets will face difficult choices. It may soon be normal for Waymos in San Francisco to avoid the Tenderloin entirely, or for robo-rides in other troubled neighborhoods to carry a steep safety surcharge. Anyone caught on an external or internal camera contributing to the chaos could find themselves locked out of a whole suite of services. Burn a Waymo today and watch your Gmail, rideshare, and delivery apps vanish tomorrow. It is not personal; it is a product searching for market fit, seeking streets and customers that do not impose extra costs for cleaning, repairs, or replacements.
Automation will always thrive first in highly predictable environments. That is why robots made their commercial debut on the factory floor, where Henry Ford had already orchestrated perfect order in service of the perfect product. Yet as robotics moves from assembly lines to city streets, its preference for order is bound to look political. If robotaxis avoid certain neighborhoods because the algorithms favor passenger safety and asset security, and if particularly politically salient demographics dominate those neighborhoods, headlines crying “Racist Robots” will be inevitable. The pattern will discriminate against men as well, since they commit the bulk of violent crime. In an age fixated on identity, every rerouted trip will read like a moral verdict. Developers will plead that it is about public crime data, insurance tables, and indifferent machine learning, yet those explanations will echo unheard across the outrage gap. Adding to the fury, several of the most high-profile automators have been anything but discreet in their opinions on demographic challenges, so their silence or corporatese compromises will convince no one.
Activists, sensing a fresh mother lode of grievances, will not bother untangling risk tables or liability clauses. Math is hard; moral outrage is easy. . They will simply point to the bright line on the map where the robotaxi service area ends, overlay it with census heat-maps, and declare the machines guilty of neo-redlining. A viral clip of a Waymo breezing past a struggling grandmother on a cracked sidewalk will do more than any white paper; it will collapse nuance into a single frame that can be rage-shared a million times.. Hashtags like #BotApartheid and #NoRideNoJustice will bloom overnight, complete with scrolling threads comparing autonomous fleet algorithms to the mortgage discrimination of the 1960s. The optics are too clean, the villains too loud, their products too silent. In a culture primed to see every differential outcome as a moral indictment, the storyline writes itself: the robots have come, and they only serve those society was constructed to serve already.
But while the rest of the world is breaking down, the benefits of automation will quietly accrue to the safe, predictable streets that the well-to-do are increasingly protective of. Well-ordered communities will integrate with this technology, receiving faster, easier-to-access services and (now automated) domestic labor that mirrors the type of in-house help that, until now, has been the exclusive luxury of the very rich. What this means is more free time; gone are the commutes and the hassle of sorting out your colored clothes for laundry. Those able to live in harmony with robotics will find that extra hours of every day have been given back to them. This is more time to get ahead, more time to spend with children, ensuring they don't fall behind; more time, in other words, exacerbating the differences between the communities capable of this integration and those who will be increasingly left behind.
The intelligent move would be to chart the map of this looming moral debate before it becomes inescapable political territory. Arguments against automation can be addressed before their fiercest voices even emerge. Policy makers may try to paper over that widening fault, yet each remedy carries its inherent cracks. Mandating universal robot coverage forces fleets to absorb higher risk and pass the bill to every rider. Quotas for human drivers keep a few jobs alive, but they also erase the efficiency that made the service possible. The code keeps optimizing while the legislation limps behind, and the market quietly routes around the rules. With every patch that fails, public trust thins, and the culture-war framing grows sharper: one side demanding safety and uptime, the other demanding equal access even when the data coldly demands the cars keep driving by.
Best buckle up.