Almost exactly a year ago, I was trapped in a Waymo heading to a hair braiding appointment when men with Discord mod physiognomy surrounded the car in SOMA and started harassing me, demanding my number. As any rational e-girl does, my instinct was to record the incident and post about it on X.
The whole thing went viral. It landed me on national news and sparked the predictable discourse about autonomous vehicles and women’s safety.
Here’s a video of Inside Edition interviewing me about it(lulz)
What struck me most wasn’t the incident itself(street harassment is unfortunately routine in many cities) but how the press wanted to fit my experience into their preferred narrative about technology. Journalists kept pushing me toward an anti-tech stance, expecting me to denounce autonomous vehicles as inherently dangerous. Despite this being a glaring security issue, I actually took a stance to say that I supported the tech in each interview I gave.
I love Waymo. I believe autonomous vehicles will save lives and should be widely adopted. I was in a life-altering car accident when I was 8 years old. My mother and aunt almost died, I missed several weeks of school, and developed PTSD following it. This incident had a profound impact on my life, and I have since chosen not to drive. I believe that cars are incredibly dangerous, and it’s astonishing that we allow humans to operate such powerful machinery. The conspiracy theorist in me does have some concerns about privacy and autonomous vehicles *but* I am overall a stan for them. I think they will save millions of lives.
When Waymo reached out afterward to do user research about what features might have helped me, I was genuinely interested in participating. The issue wasn’t the technology itself. It was a human factor oversight that had not been modeled for. At the time this happened, I was completing my Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction, and it astonished me that hardly anyone mentioned the human factors in all of this.
Luddites move too quickly to blame technology rather than recognizing it for what it is: a mirror. As our tech becomes more sophisticated, our biggest challenges will be human behavior intersecting with systems designed without considering real-world social dynamics.
What happens when someone famous or wealthy is trapped in a hackable vehicle? What if harassers learn to exploit the predictable routes and stopping patterns of autonomous cars? What if someone figures out how to track high-value targets through their ride data? These aren’t far-fetched scenarios. There are inevitable edge cases that arise when deploying technology into complex human environments.
The “people sciences” are essential infrastructure for building technology that functions safely in human societies. Industrial designers should consider these intersections from the outset. What does it mean to create a transportation system that’s simultaneously autonomous and vulnerable to social manipulation? How do you design for edge cases involving harassment, targeting, or exploitation?
My Waymo story became a minor internet moment, but it represents something larger: the growing pains of integrating sophisticated technology into a world full of unpredictable human behavior.
The solution isn’t to abandon progress. It’s to improve at anticipating how people will interact with, exploit, and coexist alongside these systems.
Perhaps then we can build a future where I can attend my hair appointment without becoming a case study in human factors engineering.
this is why i choose the bear!