this facade of automation that could lead to automation, that could lead to it, it does all kind of

come back to COVID. It comes back to that class divide, where it's completely giving up on a

working class.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host,

Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Joanne McNeil. Joanne is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles and the author of Wrong Way and Lurking. Now, if you've been listening to the show for a while,

you will probably be familiar with Joanne. She's been on the show in the past, but she had a great

new piece where she looked into the proliferation of things like delivery robots and

robo-taxies or autonomous vehicles on the streets of, you know, a growing number of U.S.

cities and what that actually feels like and what that actually means.

And I thought it was a good opportunity to have this conversation again, right?

I feel like, you know, we talked a lot about these things in the past.

And then it kind of like died off for a little bit, right?

But the companies didn't stop pushing this vision for the future of cities and for the future

of streets.

And so, you know, I think now, especially as we see, I would argue, this renewed push for robo-taxies and

self-driving vehicles and the like, I think it's the right moment to talk about this again,

to talk about why this is a problem and why we shouldn't be allowing our cities and sidewalks

to be transformed to serve the needs and the desires of these tech companies that are pushing this particular vision

for how delivery and transportation should work instead of one that centers people instead of

robots.

And that is actually about improving mobility for so many different people to make it easier

to get the places that you need to go to actually improve people's lives, rather

...