alt Hacker NewsIts an interesting question and I'm biased here. As for the morals of both parties I'll leave you with this: Waymo is cool tech that actually works and saves lives everyday. These are the parties lobbying against Waymo
- Trial Lawyers because they gain from accidents [1]
- Labour Unions [2]
- Transport Unions [3]
Most recently Uber also opposed it but in a different format, but still the same. I wonder what your take on this is? Who is being anti-human here? Who wants to help people? And who are selfish? For me it looks like each one of these parties would rather have less safety in streets than have their jobs taken away.
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/tr...
[2] https://teamster.org/2026/03/illinois-teamsters-demand-lawma...
[3] https://www.twu.org/waymo-testing-in-nyc-is-a-danger-to-the-...
Replies
> Waymo is cool tech that actually works and saves lives everyday
Is it? I don't know. I was listening about self driving cars being better the people for years now ... only to find every single time it was a lie. And always comes with "but that was old tech", but the new tech is better.
But I do give you that they are one of the few "seems like they are not as casual about killing people as Uber and Musk and rest of SB". Note that the hate toward them is also much lower then hate of AI and Musk.
> Labour Unions
Considering destruction of labor unions ended up being bad news for average poorer workers and considering the K shaped economy ... maybe we need more of them.
> Most recently Uber
Uber is poster child of a tech company being build on a fraud, trying to sell service under price, create monopoly and then jack up price. And no, famous medallions were not everywhere, plenty of places had and still have normal competitive taxi market. What Uber did there was to break labor rules, sell drives under price from VC money, tope to establish monopoly, hope law obeying taxi companies and drivers will.
All the while SV celebrated it. Frankly Uber is one of the reasons why tech is hated so generally.
Every societal shift that puts large groups of people out of jobs gets protested. Just look at how protected various groups are (like car dealerships vs online sales) because they lobbied at the right time. Same deal for the groups protesting Waymo.
The human thing to do is to protest if your livelihood is going away. That’s not evil. But it is a problem when the government just encodes one groups desires even if it’s not actually better for people.
If a community sees a building going in that they think will pollute the community (light noise, water, literally anything), they have a right to protest and push back. Does it matter what the reason is?
People are concerned about data centers because they are perceived to be disruptive and polluting, and not offering a public good to the community.
People are concerned about LLMs because there are existential questions about work, information (and misinformation), learning, and so much more. That big AI firms don’t have any answers for other than “oh yeah we’ll bulldoze that career.”
So yeah, people are concerned about this, and it’s valid. This does not make them generally anti-progress or anti-human or even anti-technology .