Robotaxis Are Here. But We're Not Ready for What Comes Next.

The future has arrived, but only if you live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or one of the dozen other cities where robotaxis now operate. According to NPR, Waymo dominates the space, with Amazon's Zoox getting approval to launch and Tesla designing a Cybercab for eventual deployment. The technology is real. The safety data looks genuinely good. And the disruption is about to be profound.

Here's what the article doesn't ask: Who pays when this technology displaces 600,000 American taxi drivers, Uber drivers, truck drivers, and delivery drivers? And who trains them for what comes next?

The Scale of Disruption

The Common Good Party's policy on automation is clear-eyed about this: 30% of all hours worked could be automated by 2030. That's not a prediction from a doomsayer. That's the evidence, and it demands a response that actually works.

Robotaxis are just the visible edge. As this technology spreads to the remaining 40+ cities on expansion roadmaps, entire occupations vanish. Not eventually. Soon.

The NPR story celebrates the safety breakthrough, Waymo vehicles crash 68% less often than human drivers, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. That's genuinely important for public safety. But it's also the reason a taxi driver in Denver should be furious and scared.

America's Retraining System Is Broken

The United States has a choice about what happens next. We can let this play out like every other wave of automation: workers bear all the cost, corporations capture all the gain, and we pretend it's not a policy choice.

Or we can actually prepare people.

Right now, only 24% of displaced workers receive any retraining at all. Denmark, a country with less than 2% of our population, invests 2% of GDP in active labor market policies. We invest 0.1%.

That's not an accident. That's a choice we've made, over and over, to let the wealthy keep more and invest less in the people paying the price for progress.

Who Pays?

Waymo and Tesla will see their stock prices climb. Investors will get richer. Passengers in rich neighborhoods will get cheaper rides. And a 48-year-old driver with 20 years behind the wheel will have a resume with one skill and nowhere to go.

This is exactly where tax policy meets the future of work. These companies will profit enormously from robotaxis. They should pay into the system that retrains the workers they've displaced. Not as charity. As fairness.

The article asks if robotaxis are finally here. The harder question is whether we're ready. The evidence says we're not.