I struggle these days whenever someone asks me for my political affiliation. But if you really force me, I’d describe myself as a “Waymo Democrat.” Waymos are the self-driving electric taxis started by Google. My party’s bumper sticker would read, “A chicken in every pot and a Waymo in every city.” And our TV ads would say: “Trump is for he/him — his grievances, his revenge, his corruption — and for bringing old stuff back ‘again,’ like coal and gasoline cars. Waymo Democrats are for ‘We the People’ and reinventing American industry anew.”
Why am I bringing this up now? It’s because, as my colleague David Brooks likes to say, Donald Trump is often the wrong answer to the right question. Trump today is offering America a spectacularly wrong answer — a tariff war against the whole world and a revival of 1960s assembly lines — to a very valid question: How do we get more Americans making stuff again?
So, then, what’s the right answer? I admire the fiery protest campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I love their ability to get people out to push back on Trump’s destroy-America-in-100-days campaign. God bless them for that.
But when I listen to A.O.C. and Sanders, I don’t hear them solving for the future. So much of what they are about is lazily bashing billionaires, along with defending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from the Trump-Elon Musk chain saw. Please, save all of that.
But if Democrats are going to again be the party of the working class, and unify the country more, they need a strategy for expanding the pie of work by expanding new industries — not just protecting the pie of benefits. At a time when Trump Republicans have so given up on the future, Democrats should be for reinventing it. And that requires a strategy to push advanced manufacturing in America into wholly new realms. And that is why I am a Waymo Democrat. It is the right answer to the right question: How can we create more good jobs in advanced manufacturing?
I say this for three reasons. First, robotaxis are going to be a huge industry, not just because I use only Waymos whenever I am in San Francisco, but because I am not alone. In just San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles — the four cities where Waymo offers its fully autonomous ride-hailing service — it’s now racking up a whopping 200,000 paid rides a week. That’s a growth industry.
Second, as I have written based on two recent trips to China, if you want to see the future of manufacturing, you need to go to China, not America anymore. But not in every industry, and robotaxis are among the exceptions. A Chinese company does offer limited robotaxi service in a few cities, but it is an industry of the future in which American technology is still more than competitive and can become even more dominant.
And while I don’t enjoy seeing anyone put out of work, taxi drivers are not in a growth industry. Whereas the number of better-paying jobs supporting a robotaxi network — A.I. researchers, engineers, data scientists, chip designers, blue-collar mechanics, electrical engineers, marketers, maintenance workers, software designers, data-center construction workers — constitute a growth industry, with good incomes for more people.
Finally, I can’t think of a more obvious moonshot project to spur advanced manufacturing in America generally than making it our goal to have Waymos or robo-Teslas — or any other brand of self-driving taxis that we can make — operating in every city in America. Because if you look under the hood of any Waymo, it is made up of chips, batteries, sensors and other components that also go into every part of the 21st-century industrial ecosystem — including robots, drones and flying cars — all infused with artificial intelligence.
Waymo uses its own proprietary artificial intelligence system for driving. That system runs on task-specific chips — GPUs (graphics processing units) and TPUs (tensor processing units) — designed in America but manufactured in Taiwan. There is no reason more could not be made here if the industry expands.
Waymos contain a collection of high-tech sensors, including lidars (short for light detection and ranging), lasers, radars, some 30 cameras and an array of external audio receivers, all tied together by U.S.-designed software to provide a comprehensive 360-degree vision for the car.
They also have onboard computers and backup systems that control braking, the battery and collision detection/avoidance. The Waymo fleet consists entirely of fully electric Jaguar I-PACE cars assembled in America with a contribution from American Axle & Manufacturing and Magna. It is protected from theft and hacking by an A.I.-controlled cybersecurity system. (And recent studies suggest they are safer than human drivers.)
Waymo is planning to have its next generation of robotaxis manufactured by Zeekr in China, but, again, there is no reason those cars, or those of a U.S. competitor, could not be made in America by Ford or G.M. (Unfortunately, in December, under economic pressure, G.M. scrapped development of its own robotaxi, Cruise, a hugely shortsighted mistake in my view.)
Let’s imagine that one day soon self-driving taxis were operating in every city in America and we, not China, became the world’s biggest market for them. There would be a huge incentive to make more and more of their components here. And that is one place I would use tariffs and government investment to give this industry a leg up.
To accelerate this industry further, Waymo Democrats would do everything Trump is doing maliciously today — but do it productively.
We would insist that big law firms that want to do business with the federal government have to offer a certain number of pro bono hours to any start-up building A.I. or other components for our robotaxi industry.
We would tell Harvard and every other Ivy League university that they can teach whatever they want, however they want. But … any student graduating with a degree in math, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering or A.I. on commencement day should get handed a refund check for their entire tuition along with their diploma.
We would tell would-be immigrants, especially from China and Russia, that if they have a degree or expertise in fields related to artificial intelligence, they can have an “A.I. visa” and stay as long as they want.
Instead of destroying the Department of Education and letting it be run by a former World Wrestling Entertainment executive who is so clueless she referred to A.I. as “A1” (as in the steak sauce), we would repurpose her agency as the Department of Engineering and Innovation — D.E.I. for short. Has a nice ring to it.
Instead of wrecking our great research institutions like the National Institutes of Health and our national labs the way Trump is, we would triple their budgets and encourage more research in robotic cars.
And, finally, we’d say to Elon Musk: “Stop wasting your talents and hurting America with your DOGE craziness and finally get the Tesla robotaxi that you have been promising for a decade out on the road. The greatest gift you could give America today is to junk your stupid chain saw, replace it with car tools and create a nationwide competition with Waymo for robotaxis.”
In sum, the best way for Democrats to demonstrate they are the party of the working people is not just by promising to protect people’s entitlements for another generation, but also by nurturing new industries, like robotaxis, that will fund them for another generation.
Remember, back in the 1960s, the moon was our destination, but the space race project spun off all sorts of new technologies, from CT scans to M.R.I.s and more, including the GPS technology that is used by Waymo cars to navigate today! A giant robotaxi industry in America and its ecosystem would surely spin off all kinds of other technologies that can sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act autonomously — all optimized by A.I. — that would be used in hospitals, homes, data centers and myriad factories.
Any time you try to invent the future you end up inventing a whole bunch of things along the way that spawn multiple industries and solve multiple problems, not just the one that you are trying to solve. Any time all that you are focused on is reinventing the past — the way Trump is with coal and combustion cars — you end up stuck in the past.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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