I was chatting with my cab driver in Portland about self-driving cars.

She told me this great little story about seeing the self-driving “Google car” pull up to her mother’s rural home one day. There were two guys inside. She said the guys looked tired and greasy, like they’d been on a stakeout for too long. They asked if they could drive onto the property to photograph it for Street View; she declined. But she did ask: If this is a self-driving car, what are you two doing in there?

According to them, one guy has to be in the self-driving car in order to live-troubleshoot any technical problems, as well as execute meatspace-only instructions like

request property access from human occupant at [GPS coordinate]

The other guy is there to take over when the first guy needs to sleep (and vice versa), so the car isn’t forced to unproductively pause its mapping activity.

This made me think: Maybe self-driving cars aren’t going to put cab drivers out of business. Maybe they will just change the human’s job: instead of driving the cab, he/she’ll be providing on-site tech support for it.

Imagine it: Stepping into an empty cab and simply trusting it to work is going to be a big leap for most people. Simply seeing another person in there could provide the “emotional ballast” necessary for establishing and maintaining this trust in the technology (at least at first).

I know I’d feel a shitload safer that way.