Day: September 22, 2025

• Jason Munderloh is a part-time ride-hailing driver and union leader for Rideshare Drivers United.
• Business Insider took Munderloh on his first robotaxi ride in San Francisco.
• Munderloh said the experience felt uncanny and missed the human connection offered with drivers.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jason Munderloh, a part-time ride-hailing driver of 10 years and lifelong San Francisco resident. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider paid for Munderloh’s rides in a Waymo and a Tesla Robotaxi.

I’m from San Francisco and have been driving for Uber and Lyft for 10 years.

I also organize a group called Rideshare Drivers United in the Bay Area.

I’ve seen the Waymos, the Cruises, and the Zooxes around the city but have avoided taking robotaxis. I don’t want to give these companies money, and I don’t support their business model. I’m always happy to talk with other rideshare drivers — it’s part of what I do as a union organizer.

I had some safety concerns, but I also think having the added element of a human driver makes travel better and more efficient.

After my experience, I’d give Waymo and Tesla Robotaxi four out of five stars. The rides felt fine, but I think there’s always room for improvement.

The pros are what I thought they might be: You don’t have to deal with a person — at least in a Waymo.

But I would’ve liked to talk to a person. I like talking to people.

Every person that I get a ride from — they’re from Eritrea, they’re from Bangalore, they’re from some place I just never really thought about, and I get to be near this person, talk to them, and find out what they think of the city that I grew up in.

I think that’s amazing.

Spokespeople for Tesla, Waymo, and Uber did not respond to a request for comment.

Waymo is pretty smooth

I appreciated that the Waymo pulled up with its hazard lights on. I think that’s the right thing to do.

The Waymo, however, stopped about a block away from where we were. I could miss a star or get a low rating for pulling up that far away from a rider for sure.

My immediate impression of the ride was that it was pretty smooth. It’s not zippy, but not frustratingly slow. The inside of the car was reasonably well-maintained.

The Waymo also has good eyes. The interface on the center console showed that it had noticed the turn signal coming from a truck a few lanes over.

I see the appeal of having time to yourself in a car and being able to put on whatever music you want. But I didn’t like the part where I was sitting next to an empty driver’s seat.

It just felt strange, and it’s hard to say why. The Waymo didn’t quite have the personality of a human. For example, it was always exactly in the middle of the lane.

Maybe that’s why I got the uncanny valley feeling — you can’t quite place it, but something’s not quite right.

But after a while, the novelty of not having a person there wore off quickly. Maybe I’m jaded because I’ve seen them around the city for a long time, but I wouldn’t pay more for one of those.

It was fine. It was a car ride.

Tesla is more zippy

I like Teslas. I considered buying the car before I ended up with a Chevy Bolt, which kind of has similar styling inside as a Tesla in some ways.

I approved of the route the vehicle took. The navigation and ride felt mostly the same as the Waymo. It felt safe under the conditions we were in.

The Waymo felt a little more conservative, while the Tesla’s acceleration was just a little bit quicker.

Overall, they’re just normal drivers.

I might use entertainment options like Netflix or YouTube if it were a long drive or if I were particularly internet-addicted. However, most of these things you’d do on your phone anyway.

It’s interesting that a person is sitting in the car with you. One of the main draws of Waymo is that you’re alone in the car.

However, I do appreciate that there’s a driver there at least because if something went wrong, there would be somebody to take over in a way a Waymo can’t.

But at the point, what’s the purpose? Why not have the driver there the whole time?

So there are mixed feelings. It seems kind of pointless on one hand, but on the other hand, the point is to get to a destination safely, and sometimes, you need a human for that.

My concern with robotaxis is less about the ride

I think I’m a better driver than a robotaxi — for now.

I would’ve gotten to the destinations quicker and safer with a more efficient route.

Waymo and Tesla did as good a job as they could, given the technology the cars are equipped with — cameras, lidars, or maps.

Having a person in the car who can pick up all the cues of the environment like the smells, the sights, the anticipation of where construction will likely be in one part of the city — all these little things that have nothing to do with the simplest form of driving — those are real things and they really do help you get from one place to another.

The robotaxis also don’t have personality. The experience was a little sterile.

There’s the loss of human connection, which is something I would hate to lose.

We’re already so disconnected from each other that we’re able to self-select human experiences that we have with each other.

It does not end well if we just continue not to think about other people and not know about other people’s very different experiences from our own.

However, most of what I think about robotaxis is about its economic impacts — and that doesn’t stop at the fact that it’s putting a driver out of work or driving their wages down.

That driver who just lost their job? They used to spend in the local economy.

I would like people to evaluate what that would mean for San Francisco, that suddenly, many people not only lose their jobs but are not spending money back into the economy.

For the most part, the reason people think that robotaxis are inevitable is because we haven’t really fought to create any control over whether we’re going to have autonomous vehicles on our roads in any organized way.

As a matter of what’s happening on our roads that we pay for through our taxes, this should be something that’s worked out somewhat democratically in a way that it hasn’t been.

I don’t want to remove these things from the roads entirely — unless that’s what the people want.

World leaders arriving in New York to mark the 80th anniversary of the United Nations need to confront one overriding fact: war and impunity, not peace and cooperation, are on the march.

The U.N. was created to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” but in 2025 there were more armed conflicts than at any time since 1945. These 59 active conflicts are not just humanitarian emergencies, they are political emergencies. Around the world, international politics are trending towards fragmentation and competition—a far cry from the unity and action evoked by this year’s U.N. theme, “Building our Future Together.”

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There are three poles to the debate about what should be done. Unfortunately they continue to pull us in divergent directions.

The division of international diplomacy

First, the U.N. system is prioritizing bureaucratic reform in the name of efficiency. There are proposals for agencies to be merged, mandates reduced, headcounts pruned. This is worthwhile, but incremental.

Meanwhile the U.S. government and some of its allies have declared parts of the U.N. system beyond the pale. The Trump Administration is withdrawing from agencies like the World Health Organization (WHO), spurning agreements to protect the climate, denying standing to the U.N. in famine-stricken Gaza, and slashing funding from the aid system. Undermining international diplomacy in these ways creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of defensiveness and inadequacy.

The third pole was evident in Beijing earlier this month. President Xi declared China to be the bulwark of the multilateral system, but at the same time embraced leaders of Russia and North Korea who are in flagrant violation of multilateral rules.

None of this offers hope to people in Sudan, Gaza, or Ukraine for whom U.N. action is the last hope. More than three-quarters of the way through 2025, the foreign aid needed for Sudan, the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, affecting 30 million people, is less than 25% funded. Words are cheap but too often absent: the crisis in Sudan was mentioned only eight times in the approximately 16,000 words spoken during speeches by the Permanent Members of the Security Council at last year’s General Assembly debate

Nor has the U.N. met the moment of pressing global threats. Secretary General Guterres’ idea of a treaty on AI weaponry is stillborn. Investment in pandemic preparedness is back to pre-COVID levels.

Having just come from Sudan, I have also seen first-hand the consequences of stalled mediation processes and inadequate collective efforts at humanitarian relief: the Sudan conflict is metastasizing, engaging more and more neighboring countries. 

The U.N.’s mission

At a time when governments appear unable or unwilling to come together to address big problems, we need to take inspiration from the opening words of the U.N. Charter: “We the peoples of the United Nations.”

That charter set out the rights of states under international law, but it also lays out the commitment to promoting and protecting fundamental human rights. Today, the moral authority designed to flow from the UN’s service to humanity is in danger of being lost to the abuse of veto power, bureaucratic drift, withdrawal, aid cuts and political compromise.  We need to bring people, civil society, back to the center of the multilateral system.

The U.N. reflects the politics of its member states. The danger today is that the worst of national interests prevent genuine problems from being addressed and solutions being advanced. One area where the U.N. has patent locus, and where progress should be possible, concerns where aid is spent, what it is spent on, how it is delivered, and how it is funded. Civil society has been driving solutions forward—in spite of political gridlock. And while treating the symptoms of conflict is no substitute for tackling its roots, it is essential given the dramatic rise in conflict today.

A case in point concerns the issue of the moment: famine and humanitarian crisis in Sudan and Gaza. An estimated 45 million children are affected in regions such as these. Today, famine is one of the leading causes of mortality in children under 5 worldwide. Yet the current treatment and delivery system is unnecessarily bifurcated, with two U.N. agencies involved (UNICEF and World Food Programme), using two products (Ready to Use Therapeutic Food and ready to Use Supplementary Food) to treat severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) separately. In total, we estimate that around 80% of acutely malnourished children in conflict do not get help from this complicated system.

In the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, where climate shocks and conflict converge, the IRC is treating acute malnutrition at the community level using a simplified, integrated protocol for the treatment of severe and moderate acute malnutrition that cuts treatment costs by up to 30%. On a global scale this system would allow treatment of millions more children with the same resources. These are transformative, scalable interventions, and they demonstrate what’s possible when civil society is enabled—not constrained—by the aid system.

Vaccination provides another example. The IRC’s REACH project, in partnership with GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, has delivered over 20 million vaccine doses to zero and under-immunized children in the hardest-to-reach areas in four East African countries through a localized approach that works in conflict zones, negotiating with conflicting parties, rather than ignoring them. The cost is only $4 per vaccine shot. When REACH launched in 2022, a mere 16% of the over 150 target communities were accessible to humanitarian actors. By negotiating access, that figure is now 96%. The GAVI model is a prime example of how civil society, with the support of the private sector, the U.N. and committed governments, can deliver life-saving interventions at scale in communities mired in worsening humanitarian crises.

Civil society does not hold a magic key. But it can address the consequences of political failure, and promote remedies. That is why, as the U.N. turns 80, the former Director-General of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy has called for “plurilateral” action, involving not just nation states, but also civil society, and the private sector.

What is needed is the resources and political backing. With more resources available to do good than ever before in human history, we the people need to be ready to step up. 

The United Nations is a great idea. It has an inspiring mission. Now it needs to fullfil it.