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.
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