Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
Will self-driving cars transform our transportation infrastructure? For several years we have been hearing that driverless vehicles will be taking over the streets, and that this transportation revolution will be a great thing for consumers as well as society.
Imagine, your own personal robot driver who picks you up and drops you off, 24/7. No more parking woes or falling asleep at the wheel. Leading companies like Tesla and Waymo have claimed that their robo cars are safer than human-driven vehicles. Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google/Alphabet, says its vehicles have logged more than 7 million practice miles on public roads, and also 20 billion miles in “simulation.”
That sounds like a lot until you realize that there are 243 million licensed drivers in the United States who drive on average about 13,500 miles a year. That’s a total of 3.3 trillion miles driven every year.
Will any of these driverless services ever live up to the Silicon Valley hype? It’s one thing to test-drive on a track or a computer simulation, but the chaos and confusion of streets in the real world have proven to be a greater challenge than the brash entrepreneurs at Waymo or Tesla’s Elon Musk will admit. Now that the companies are required to report all accidents, it turns out there have been a lot more of them than the public knew.
Recently Waymo became the target of a new federal investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Its investigators flagged nearly two dozen recent incidents when Waymo's vehicles were involved in a collision or exhibiting erratic behavior. There have been increasing reports of collisions with stationary objects, such as gates and parked vehicles, as well as violations of traffic laws.
Waymo’s main competitor, Cruise, paused operations entirely after numerous incidents of erratic operation. That includes an incident in San Francisco that resulted in a pedestrian being dragged 20 feet by a Cruise vehicle, even as Cruise withheld video of the incident from regulators.
Previously an Uber robo vehicle killed a pedestrian, and San Francisco’s fire chief warned that driverless cars interfered with emergency vehicles nearly 40 times in 2023 alone. In April, the NHTSA opened investigations into collisions involving self-driving vehicles run by Amazon-owned Zoox, as well as partially automated driver-assist systems from Tesla and Ford.
NHTSA has identified at least 13 Tesla crashes involving one or more deaths while drivers were using Autopilot, and many more involving serious injuries.
Many members of the public are not happy about this new danger on city streets. In San Francisco, an angry crowd set fire to a Waymo driverless taxi just days after a Waymo car hit a bicyclist. Previously, a Waymo vehicle had struck and killed a dog.
So it looks like industry hype is outracing reality. Part of the issue is one of “trust.” The motto of Silicon Valley has always been “move fast and break things” and “apologize later.” When that reckless attitude gets applied to robo cars, it’s fair to ask whether it is OK that these companies act as if our streets are their laboratory and we’re their guinea pigs.
I enjoy my smartphone and a few techno-trinkets as much as anyone, and certainly many new technologies can bring welcome benefits. But I remember back in 2017 when several tech companies and investors revealed their latest shiny object — flying cars. Uber announced that it would be piloting an aerial taxi service in Los Angeles by 2020. At the time Uber was losing billions of dollars because it used predatory pricing to subsidize each ride as a way to monopolize the market and drive out competitors (including public transportation).
Yet the media lapped it up, even though Uber didn’t even have a working prototype for a service where the equivalent of a fender-bender in the air would be death. Unsurprisingly, the Jetsons’ taxi never took off.
Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret is that seven out of 10 start-ups fail and nine of 10 never earn a profit. Silicon Valley is a casino where investors roll the dice. So the entrepreneurs often feel pressured to sound like circus impresario P.T. Barnum trying to over-hype their latest show.
Don’t get me wrong, the fact that these vehicles can self-drive at all is a marvel. And Waymo counters that 40,000 people are killed by human-driven vehicles every year. But that’s misleading because it’s spread across three trillion miles. How will society decide the threshold for when robo cars are deemed safer than humans?
Maybe these companies should have to create a test city in the desert and experiment there. Currently, the limited abilities of robo cars make them suitable for a Disney World ride, or as shuttles on a university campus or industrial park where the vehicle could safely drive the same repetitive route. Or perhaps they can be used as long distance delivery trucks, which would only have to drive straight on an interstate, and at the city limits a human could drive it into the city.
Instead, regulators mostly have been hands-off, with California recently allowing scandal-plagued Waymo to expand in Los Angeles. The Waymo-ification of our streets seems to be proceeding against all common sense, even as its actual benefits remain elusive.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.