Anne Wojcicki, cofounder and CEO of the personal genetics company 23andMe, was driving in Silicon Valley one day when she got stuck behind a self-driving car.
Apparently, the car was too afraid to turn left.
"They're very cautious," she said. "I was like, 'Move, you damn self-driving car!'"
Wojcicki told this story to astrophysicist and StarTalk Radio host Neil deGrasse Tyson for our Innovators video series, in between discussing how understanding the human genome could revolutionize healthcare and biotechnology.
Tyson couldn't believe that a self-driving car blocking your way was a casual occurrence, but Wojcicki said there's so much new technology in the Valley that you get used to this kind of encounter.
Wojcicki said she was happy to see that it was cautious in case her kids get in one someday — she wants it to be careful.
Besides alleviating the need to drive yourself, Wojcicki sees an even bigger impact that self-driving cars could have on the environment.
Clive Thompson explained this idea in Mother Jones:
If cars can drive themselves, fleets of them could scurry around picking people up and dropping them off, working with sleek, robotic efficiency ... Indeed, many urbanists predict that fleets of robocars could become so reliable that many, many people would choose not to own automobiles, causing the amount of parking needed to drop through the floor.
The magnitude of that kind of urban shift has the potential to be far more significant in the long-term than the added safety and simple convenience of a car that people don't have to drive themselves.
"Imagine a world where there are only self-driving cars and you no longer have to have parking lots. It's a pretty spectacular image of all that land that you can reclaim," Wojcicki said. "Self-driving cars are going to fundamentally change the way that we operate."
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