Alexis Madrigal ponders the future in the back of Waymo’s self-driving car. “When Alphabet, GM Cruise, Uber, and other companies investing in autonomous cars evangelize the technology, they present it as a way to escape the tedious, dangerous moil of driving. But encountering the technology in the field, on actual city streets, doesn’t trigger the exciting pang of future freedom. Instead, it produces a stranger feeling: discomfort that an ethereal intelligence inhabits the human world.” (That reads almost exactly like a NextDraft testimonial…)

+ “No ultimately successful major technology company has been as deeply unprofitable for anywhere remotely as long as Uber has been.” Yves Smith makes the case that Uber Is Headed for a Crash.

+ Bloomberg: Almost Every Electric Scooter in the World Comes From This Chinese Company. (And that’s a lot of scooters…)