A San Francisco resident watches a Cruise autonomous taxi pick up a passenger outside his apartment building, announcing the destination and greeting the rider by name. He compares the moment to early cinema audiences panicking at onscreen trains, a technology that once seemed impossible now becoming routine.
I live over in San Francisco, and I walked outside of my apartment the other day, and there was one of the Cruise cars there. If you go to San Francisco, it's people driving them around all the time. You just see them on the road, and they basically have tons of cameras, and they're training the data. But this one, I thought it just like someone had parked it there. So I went up to it, and I'm looking in the window and stuff, and someone yells, hey, man, what are you doing?
I'm like, what do you mean, what am I doing?
He's like, no, no, that's my ride. I'm like, what? What do you mean? And he comes up and opens the door. He's like, oh, yeah, it's Cruise. They're actually doing self-driving taxis around San Francisco now. Gets in, he puts on the buckle. It's like, welcome, Jim. Fasten your seatbelt, headed to 581 Post Street. You know, and he like gets in, buckles up, and he's like, oh yeah, man, like, isn't this pretty cool? And it drives away, and I'm like, wow, man, I'm gonna tell my grandkids one day, like, oh, I remember back in 2022 when I saw the first ever self-driving car.
Just like my grandpa used to tell me about the first time they went to the cinema and they had the picture of a train coming towards them and everybody fucking ran outside.
Everybody ran outside.
