I thought I was coming out to Southern California just to visit my son and have a cameo appearance in something he’s filming. Then, very shortly after getting off my plane, I realized that I had accidentally traveled into THE FUTURE.
It is so very apropos that the future I found was in the Los Angeles area where Marty McFly traveled to the future. Some of you might already be here. It was also perfectly appropriate that in the 40th anniversary year of Back To The Future that I found my way to the future in a cool car just like Marty did.
Waymo self-driving car in front of Google’s San Francisco headquarters, San Francisco, California, June 7, 2024. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado)
That car is what’s known as a Waymo. It’s like an Uber without a driver. They’ve existed for about 8 years in a handful of states. You summon one like you would an Uber but when it arrives, there’s no one in the car, which is a Jaguar by the way. When mine arrived it had my initials displayed in the screen of that little hat on the top of the car.
Once you get in, the car ominously locks the doors and moves forward and carefully slips into moving traffic. I sat in the front passenger seat. For music on the ride, the Waymo can be connected to your phone if you’d like or it offers a full library of playlists. I picked Electronic Dance Music (EDM) because that seems like the music that would be in a movie about a robot car kidnapping me.
Pic from San Francisco Chronicle
The car drove as well or better than many of the L.A. drivers and I arrived safely. Yes, occasionally a Waymo will be involved in an accident, but to be honest, I trust a Waymo way more than other human drivers.
Driverless cars aren’t the only futuristic tech tools that have arrived in SoCal. If you walk around for about 5 minutes you’re bound to run into another mobile tech driven gadget.
These little robots are running around on the sidewalks delivering food. Yesterday I confronted one and it stopped. As soon as I stepped out from in front of it, it began to go forward. Big surprise. I wasn’t letting it off the hook that easy. I ran a circle around it, causing it to stop again, twice.
Interestingly, my son told me that there are actually people in India whose job is to be monitoring these little delivery robots just in case they run into a situation AI is not prepared for. Like me. (I did verify that is true)
As I ran around it, I saw the little camera, which looked like our normal car back up cameras, and I waved at the camera and stepped aside, making the day of someone in India. ( ThePhilFactor does get a lot of traffic from India due to previous posts about Hindi sexting. Hello my friends from India!) Also, apparently, you’re not supposed to ride the delivery robots. Smh.
I hope my message from the future will get to your outdated technology like cell phones and the old fashioned internet. Thanks again for reading me! If you’ve had some fun meeting with the future, please put them in the comments. I’d love to hear about them. ~Phil
No self driving cars for me. Uh uh.
I’d rather ride the delivery bot, at least I could jump off.
I run a Spooky Club at school and last week, the kids were discussing time travel. One kid said that he would go back to 1936 and shoot Hitler before the holocaust happened, then bring his body to the present day to study his brain and find out “why people do bad stuff”. Another piped up that, since the holocaust was averted, Hitler wouldn’t have done the bad stuff. “So you’d just be, like, some dude carrying a random dead body around.”
Lol! What a great discussion!
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