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Two years late, Waymo, Google's lavishly-funded autonomous car company, is finally rolling out a driverless taxi service that is open to the general public. For the past few years, certain passengers enrolled in a Waymo program have been riding around in these vehicles, most of the time with safety drivers behind the wheel, as Waymo tries to improve its service. It's limitations are pretty clear: the service is limited to a relatively small part of Phoenix's sprawling exurbs. What's more, most rides will still have safety drivers – only about 100 per week will be fully driverless.

Despite a near-decade of tech boosters’ assurances that full self-driving technology is just around the corner, Waymo, the eleven-year-old industry leader, has made only modest progress despite hundreds of millions (maybe billions?) of dollars of research and testing. Projecting its progress into the future is difficult, but you could see the company plausibly scaling up this program to most of the city of Phoenix in a couple years, then moving on to new, more difficult territory after that, trying to figure out how to run these machines in places with different laws and much more forbidding weather conditions, with perhaps more general availability in five or ten years.

But it's interesting to note that even when these vehicles are operating driverlessly, they're not driving operator-lessly. There are remote operators supervising the cars' driving who can intervene when necessary to help the vehicles deal with situations they don't know how to resolve on their own. The situation sounds very analogous to how self-checkout technology has evolved over the past ten or fifteen years. When self-checkouts rolled out initially, people feared that grocery stores would replace their human cashiers with robotic ones in short order. However, what actually has happened is that most stores still have half or more of their checkouts run by humans, and the self-checkout areas have one human supervising half a dozen self-checkout terminals. They have to intervene constantly to make sure the machines work properly and to resolve issues like checking ID.

You have to wonder if this is the future we will see for self-driving cars once they start showing up in major cities. It’s easy to envision a situation where most of the ride (the easy part) goes as planned, but you still have awkward hiccups where the car halts in confusion and its occupants have to wait for an unseen human to jump in and help it along, or maybe even talk to you on your phone or an intercom to sheepishly ask you things like "the car thinks you want to get dropped off two hundred feet away, but it doesn't know how to get there, are you close enough to walk from here?" Savvy users might be able to work around this by choosing destinations or routes that they know the car will find easy to understand, but it's easy to imagine a lot of them getting confused and frustrated by the car's lack of common sense.

There's always the possibility of a rapid shift in AI that will break down these barriers to full self-driving vehicles in the next decade (and solve self-checkouts as well), but it really looks we're still headed toward the equilibrium of non-quite good enough.