There’s no such thing as a smart sports bet, but the first one I ever made was, by any measure, particularly stupid. It was late January 2022, and mobile-gaming apps had become legal in New York only a few weeks earlier. I had successfully ignored all of them until I saw Joe Burrow, the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, walk into Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City for the AFC Championship game wearing a sherpa coat, black turtleneck, huge gold chain, and rimless sunglasses. That man is not losing a football game today, I thought to myself.

When I saw Burrow’s outfit, I knew what to do immediately, even though I’d never really contemplated betting on sports before. Signing up for a new DraftKings account got me a $100 free bet, and I put it on the Bengals moneyline. Advertisements for gaming apps had blanketed virtually every surface of the city as soon as their use had become legal. Much of the same is true in the dozens of other states that have legalized mobile sports betting, and gambling is even inescapable in the places where you can’t do it: Frank discussion of betting odds and point spreads has become a marquee feature of sports media, where the topic had long been forbidden.

The sports-betting boom shows few signs of slowing. Yesterday afternoon, ESPN made an announcement that was both unprecedented and expected. This fall, in a 10-year, $2 billion deal with the gaming company Penn Entertainment, the most powerful sports-media company in the United States by a wide margin will launch its own digital sportsbook, ESPN Bet. The partnership, which will lead ESPN and its talent to promote the sportsbook on its television networks, website, and smartphone apps, cements a transformation that would have seemed all but impossible even five years ago. Betting, once completely excluded from mainstream sports, is now inextricable from nearly every level of the business. Gaming companies sponsor television coverage, put their names on arenas, operate sportsbooks in stadiums, and partner with teams. The game is over. Betting won.

For much of the modern history of professional sports, even the vaguest acknowledgments that some viewers might be interested in games for reasons other than a pure-hearted love were largely verboten. For decades, the NFL forbade the networks airing its games from even discussing point spreads. The convention slowly began to erode as fantasy sports became popular in the 2000s, but the real turning point came in 2018, when a Supreme Court decision cleared the way for states to legalize sports gambling. Five years and one ferocious gaming-industry lobbying push later, 36 states and Washington, D.C., have joined Nevada in doing exactly that. Most disruptive of all have been those that now allow bets to be placed in mobile apps, moving the sportsbook into America’s pockets.

When done with even a modicum of skill, bookmaking is an extremely profitable venture; people are, by and large, very bad at gambling. Suddenly, millions of new bettors who might have never sought out casinos can make impromptu bets on their phone while at a sports bar or on their couch, including wagers on moment-to-moment minutiae in live games, such as the outcome of the next play or at-bat. Companies such as DraftKings and FanDuel, which already had robust apps and large pools of existing users playing fantasy sports, were the first to capitalize on the gaming gold rush, along with well-known casino operators such as Caesars and MGM. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly one in five Americans had gambled on sports in the previous year—a huge proportion of the population, considering that some of the country’s most populous states, including California and Texas, have so far resisted legalization.

Betting has become inescapable for even casual fans with no interest in it—app commercials are ubiquitous during game broadcasts, gaming jargon is a standard part of the sportscaster lexicon, and players and coaches now regularly get in very high-profile trouble for their own gambling exploits. Some less traditional sports-media outlets were quick to partner with gaming companies once legalization began, funneling readers toward existing services or opening their own. Now even powerful broadcast networks have fewer incentives than ever to stick to their hard-line stance on the topic. They can argue that viewer demands have changed, and that failing to get into the betting business would actually be a disservice to their audience. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said as much about betting coverage and partnerships in an interview with The Athletic last year: “It’s something that our fans are expecting from us,” he said. “So it’s not a ‘nice to have,’ it’s pretty much at this point a must-have.”

Regardless of demand, all that gaming cash has caught broadcasters at an especially weak moment. Although ESPN in particular is still enormously profitable—to the tune of billions of dollars a year—the decline of cable has made continued growth look difficult, and growth is what shareholders want. No matter how creatively you do the math, streaming subscriptions are unlikely to make up the difference. Media executives go where the money is, and right now, the biggest piles of new money are available to those who encourage viewers to gamble. If even ESPN can’t hold out, and apparently has no desire to try, then no one can.

Those piles of money are not guaranteed to save the business, or even be around for very long. The lavish, years-long marketing and promotional campaigns that have filled sports media’s pockets are designed to onboard new bettors in new markets en masse, and their huge expense means that many of the mobile betting apps are not yet profitable. Pressure on sportsbooks to make money has begun to increase, and it’s already killed Fox Bet, the closest existing analog to what ESPN plans to launch this fall.

But in entering this market, ESPN has more advantages than any of its putative competitors—and more conflicts of interest. ESPN owns some or all of the broadcast rights to nearly every major sport in America, which means that it has enormous influence over how the entire business is conducted. It’s also the country’s biggest source of sports news, and how ESPN covers the industry already affects how unaffiliated sportsbooks set odds and how regular people make bets. Now ESPN will have its thumb on all three scales: influencing the leagues, informing the public, and setting the betting lines. (ESPN says that it will maintain a strict demarcation between its journalists and its betting operation.)

If you’re one of the (many, many) fans who find it irritating to now get much of your sports news filtered through the lens of what it means for bettors, the situation can only get worse as ESPN gets more centrally involved in gaming. Or maybe it’ll just turn you into a gambler against your better judgment, precisely as intended.

The disappearance of Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has generated a torrent of speculation about what might have happened to him. The mystery points to a larger, and disconcerting, truth: We understand very little about the inner workings of Chinese politics at a moment when we need to know more than ever.

China’s Communist regime has always been opaque. But the more China’s global power rises, the more problematic the Communist Party’s secrecy becomes. The decisions made in Beijing influence the wealth and welfare of billions of people, the health of the planet, and war and peace itself. Yet policy makers and diplomats around the world are too often left guessing about how these decisions are made, who is making them, and why.

The current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has further narrowed the already small window into the cloistered halls of power. “Secrecy is the default position of the Communist Party anyway, but it has been put on steroids under Xi,” Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, told me.

[Read: Can a million Chinese people die and nobody know?]

In the strained relationship between the United States and China, the dearth of reliable information about Beijing’s circumstances and decision making could lead to dangerous misunderstandings. “This is a real problem in U.S.-China relations,” Carl Minzner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in Chinese government, told me. “You start to lose your appreciation for what is actually taking place in China and why,” with the result that “it is always easy to ascribe the worst narrative” to China’s actions.

The missing minister is a case in point. Qin Gang is a well-known figure in Washington, where he previously served as ambassador to the United States before being promoted to foreign minister in December. He has been widely seen as an up-and-coming politician and a Xi loyalist. He was awarded a seat on the powerful Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in October.

In early July, Qin failed to appear at several important diplomatic meetings. China watchers took note as Beijing abruptly canceled a planned visit by the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, and as China’s foreign ministry later cited health issues as the reason Qin did not attend a summit with Southeast Asian nations.

Later that month, Qin was suddenly removed as foreign minister and replaced by his predecessor, Wang Yi. Two days after the announcement, the foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning was asked about that decision at a briefing, and she offered no explanation, instead protesting the “malicious hype of this matter.”  

The government appears to be confused about how to present Qin’s disappearance. After his dismissal, the foreign ministry began erasing Qin from its website, only to reverse course and restore the deleted references. Meanwhile, Qin’s whereabouts remain unknown. He has not been seen in public since June 25.

Tsang attributes the obfuscation surrounding Qin to the Communist Party’s tendency to place its own perceived interests ahead of concern for the international community or even the nation. “What the Chinese foreign minister does or doesn’t do, or what happens to him, matters to the rest of the world,” Tsang said. “Does the Communist Party, in particular its core leader, give much of a monkey for this implication for the rest of the world? No.”

China watchers have stepped in to fill the information void with debate and speculation about Qin’s apparent downfall. Conditioned by experience with official deception, many experts have suspected that something sinister is afoot. Perhaps Qin ran afoul of the party bosses and became the target of a purge, or was the subject of an investigation for unknown infractions. A narrative emerged that alleges Qin had an affair—and possibly a child—with a journalist at a Chinese-language television network. Though hardly moral paragons, China’s top leaders frown upon such personal foibles if they can potentially compromise the Communist Party.

But the sex-scandal saga could just as easily be utter nonsense. Qin so far seems to have retained his other, more influential, posts, including on the party’s Central Committee, which implies that politics may not be at play. Or that Xi has not yet decided on Qin’s ultimate fate. Or that the party is trying to deflect criticism from Xi, who elevated Qin over more experienced officials, in the hope that the controversy blows over.

Or … who knows. But therein lies the big point. If the world’s best China experts can’t figure out what happened to one of China’s most internationally recognizable officials, then imagine what else remains hidden behind the regime’s closed doors.

The party prefers it that way. Michelle Mood, a longtime China expert at Kenyon College, commented to me that the Qin affair reveals “the limits of the knowable with regard to China.”

Xi has consistently tightened the state’s grip on information within China. In recent years, censors have suppressed discussion of economic policy, LGBTQ issues, and even K-pop. Regulators recently finalized new rules for chatbots run by artificial intelligence that, though less stringent than an earlier draft, insist the content generated must be in line with the country’s socialist values. In May, authorities detained a comedian who told a joke about China’s military and fined the company he worked for $2 million—a sign of just how sensitive the state can be.

Xi’s government has shown heightened paranoia about what the world knows about China as well. Earlier this year, a prominent database of Chinese academic research curtailed foreign access to its platform. Vincent Brussee and Kai von Carnap, analysts at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, argued in a recent paper that a newly amended anti-espionage law could target “almost anyone who exchanges information with international counterparts” and that the aim is “to make the Communist Party the sole narrator of China’s story.” The state security ministry, in its first post on a social-media account, encouraged Chinese citizens to get involved in antispying efforts by spying on others.

Tsang argues that the trend toward greater secrecy is a consequence of Xi’s centralization of power. “Unlike in collective leadership, when the top leader can hide behind collective decisions, there is nowhere for Xi Jinping to hide,” Tsang told me. Exerting control over information through secrecy allows a strongman to protect his stature and to claim infallibility: “If nobody knows what actually happened, you were never wrong, because they can never find evidence to show that you were wrong,” Tsang said.

But in truth Xi has often been wrong, and China is suffering for it. His policies have contributed to a sagging economy, hostile relations with most of the world’s major powers, and growing pessimism about the nation’s future. With a shortage of good news to boast of, Xi preserves his political standing by wielding ever greater influence over narratives about China.

[Read: The end of optimism in China]

The effort to stave off criticism and bad news has led the leadership to treat topics of discussion that were once considered relatively safe ground—such as economic policy—as potentially threatening. To Minzner, the Council on Foreign Relations fellow, this rise in sensitivity toward formerly innocuous subject matter is evidence of a broader trend toward “securitization,” in which the system responds to economic and social pressures by locking down access to information. Put another way, according to Mood, the Communist Party’s “political legitimacy, no longer supported by a growing economy, is now based on censorship to control information and knowledge.”

The thickening shroud of secrecy is a problem not only for policy makers around the world, but also for those governing China. Domestic officials responsible for addressing the consequences of the country’s slowing growth and social pressures are not talking to one another, says Mary Gallagher, a specialist in Chinese politics at the University of Michigan. “I don’t think the system is as responsive as it used to be, and I think that will be very problematic based on how many problems it needs to solve in the next five to 10 years,” Gallagher told me.

In other words, Xi’s secrecy could imperil his ambitions for China and its role in the world. The Qin Gang mystery is thus a warning sign of profound and dangerous weaknesses in the Chinese political system that have emerged under Xi’s rule and are likely to continue to deepen.

The Qin affair “points to this issue of elite instability that I think we’ll see more of in China,” Gallagher said. “We don’t know the process by which the next leader is going to be chosen, and we also don’t know when the next leader will be chosen. That just makes the people who are jockeying for that position and of course the people around them just more prone to internal struggles.”

The world will likely have to guess at those machinations as well. “I really worry that we are moving into an era where people understand less and less what’s actually taking place in China,” Minzner told me. “I find it very difficult to figure out how this gets reversed.”  

A few weeks ago, Dan Afergan, a software engineer, met a few friends at 540 Rogues, a bar in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. As Afergan and his companions nursed their drinks, someone walked in with some unusual news: “There’s a Cruise out there with a cone stuck on it.”

Afergan stepped outside to check it out. Sure enough, a self-driving cab from the company Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, stood frozen in the middle of the street, its hazard lights blinking. A bright-orange cone was perched on the robotaxi’s hood.

“At the time, I thought it was a dumb prank,” Afergan told me later. “But one friend said, ‘No, I’ve heard about this.’ Until then I didn’t know that there are a bunch of people who are anti–autonomous vehicles.”

[Read: Seven arguments against the autonomous-vehicle utopia]

The “coning” that Afergan witnessed was part of a campaign launched by Safe Street Rebel, a local activist group previously known for organizing protests in support of bike-lane construction and public-transit funding. Now its members have turned their attention to robotaxis. According to government data reported by the news site Mission Local, Cruise and its rival Waymo—a subsidiary of Google’s parent, Alphabet—together operate 571 self-driving cabs in California. Users can hail them via an app. Service is concentrated in San Francisco, where the companies have been subject to a variety of limits imposed by the California Public Utilities Commission. The two companies now want the CPUC to remove those restrictions, despite objections from San Francisco’s police union and transportation and fire departments about robotaxis’ troubling habit of blocking traffic and obstructing emergency vehicles. The commission has postponed a decision twice but is expected to vote tomorrow.

After realizing that placing a simple orange cone on the hood seemed to paralyze a state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle, Safe Street Rebel posted a TikTok video encouraging San Francisco residents to try it for themselves. Hell no. We do not consent to this, a caption declares over a clip of a robotaxi on a city street. As the video ricocheted across social media, Cruise and Waymo were unamused, threatening to call the cops on anyone who placed a cone on their cars.

One might dismiss the guerrilla-style coning of robotaxis as one more sign of an anti-tech backlash, or just of San Francisco being San Francisco. But those narratives understate the significance of the current uproar. For the first time, urban residents, tech companies, and public officials are debating whether and how self-driving cars fit into a dense city. This is a conversation that needs to happen now, while autonomous-vehicle technology is still under development—and before it reshapes life in San Francisco and throughout urban America. A century ago, the U.S. began rearranging its cities to accommodate the most futuristic vehicles of the era, privately owned automobiles—making decisions that have undermined urban life ever since. Robotaxis could prove equally transformative, which makes proceeding with caution all the more necessary.

In the utopian version of the robotaxi story, trips in autonomous electric vehicles become so affordable, easy, and pleasant that many people decide to forgo owning their own car. Because San Francisco is close to Silicon Valley and is home to so many investors and tech journalists, the city is a high-profile, high-stakes testing ground for the emergent technology. It’s also a more challenging environment for autonomous cars than sprawling places such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, which have fewer pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.

The novelty of self-driving cars is a key part of their appeal. “Tourists take pictures of me, so I get to feel like a small celebrity,” a San Francisco resident named David Anderson, who says he requests a Waymo ride multiple times a week, told me. Beyond the wow factor, these companies offer a service akin to ride-hailing, which researchers have found worsens urban congestion and pulls riders away from transit.

Perhaps the most appealing argument for robotaxis and other self-driving vehicles is that human drivers are so fallible. Last month, a Waymo co-CEO published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle extolling the safety of the company’s vehicles, and Cruise ran a full-page ad in The New York Times and other newspapers presenting its technology as a solution for the 42,795 road deaths last year in the United States. (The companies have been reluctant to share data on their operations, hampering unaffiliated researchers who might weigh in objectively.) For now, though, robotaxis are creating a slew of headaches for San Francisco officials. Even with limited deployment, the vehicles have blocked traffic lanes, obstructed buses and streetcars, driven over a fire hose, and entered an active construction zone. Since June 2022, San Francisco logged almost 600 instances in which robotaxis made unplanned stops—some lasting hours—on public streets. That count was limited to incidents reported to city officials, suggesting that the actual number could be far higher.

[Read: Finally, the self-driving car]

“These vehicles perform very well in basic suburban driving conditions, but they face challenges when cities have greater levels of complexity, and particularly when they are in unexpected situations,” Jeffrey Tumlin, the head of San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency, told me. “In a city like San Francisco, the unexpected is ubiquitous.” Jeanine Nicholson, the city’s fire chief, offered a blunter robotaxi assessment: “They’re not ready for prime time.” Steven Shladover, a research engineer at UC Berkeley who has advised California officials about autonomous vehicles, told me that Cruise and Waymo vehicles sometimes show admirable sophistication. But, he said, “you’ll almost inevitably encounter a situation where the vehicle will act like an inexperienced driver. It’s an adolescent, not yet an adult.”

Cruise and Waymo have responded to critics by touting their vehicles’ overall safety record, which they argue is far superior to human drivers’. “We should be doing everything possible to quickly and safely scale this technology and combat a horrific status quo,” Cruise declared in a statement last month, after CPUC postponed its decision on easing limits on robotaxis. “Every single day of delay in deploying this [life]-saving autonomous driving technology has critical impacts on road safety,” Waymo asserted.

Robotaxi companies are under pressure to scale up quickly. Having invested billions of dollars, their backers want to see growth (the demise last year of Argo AI, a prominent robotaxi competitor backed by Ford and Volkswagen, undermined investor confidence in the industry). Cruise is aiming to put 1 million robotaxis on U.S. streets by around 2030, and CEO Kyle Vogt said during an earnings call last month that “certainly there is the capacity to absorb several thousand [robotaxis] per city at a minimum.” (When I requested comment from Cruise by email, the company did not respond to my questions about its expansion goals.) Any delay from the CPUC—one of whose five members is Cruise’s former managing counsel—makes the company’s objectives harder to achieve.

Despite its current challenges, self-driving technology is steadily improving, inferring new lessons from reams of data collected from vehicles plying public streets. Eventually, robotaxis might avoid the kinds of traffic and safety hazards that have afflicted San Francisco. But even if robotaxis operate perfectly, what would life be like in a city where they are ubiquitous?

Before gas-powered automobiles arrived en masse, American streets bustled with activity. Pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and bicyclists jostled for space, and children played stickball, marbles, and other games on the pavement. Streetcars carried millions of passengers on 45,000 miles of track; in the 1920s, most of Chicago’s nearly 100 streetcar lines operated 24 hours a day, with some providing service at eight-to-10-minute intervals in the dead of night. Photographs of urban thoroughfares at the dawn of the 20th century may appear chaotic, but the danger was limited, because no one traveled much faster than 15 miles per hour.

Early on, cars were too pricey for all but the most affluent urban residents. But after the introduction of the Ford Model T, U.S. car sales surged, rising from 181,000 in 1910 to 4.5 million in 1929. Traveling faster than anything else on the street, these vehicles soon presented a mortal threat to pedestrians and children. Some 25,800 people died in crashes in 1927, a per-capita fatality rate substantially higher than today’s despite Americans owning far fewer cars at the time. “The dead were city people, they were not in motor vehicles, and they were young,” the University of Virginia historian Peter Norton wrote in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.

[Read: Everyone has ‘car brain’]

In the early 1920s, Norton recounts in his book, St. Louis and Pittsburgh residents erected immense memorials to those killed in car crashes. In Cincinnati, a 1923 ballot initiative proposed a mandate that all motor vehicles within the city be outfitted with speed governors set to 25 miles per hour. “Forty-two thousand people put their names on petitions, just in that city,” Norton told me. “That’s a sign that there were a lot of people troubled by car domination.” Alarmed, the auto industry rushed to mobilize against the Cincinnati measure, which was defeated.

Seeking to avoid debating whether fast vehicles could coexist with urban neighborhoods, the car industry worked with friendly government officials to reframe road safety as the responsibility of the individuals at risk of being struck. Car groups funded school curricula instructing children to stay out of streets and worked to establish jaywalking as a crime. Meanwhile, city sidewalks and public spaces were torn up to expand traffic lanes.

Urban cars proved devastating for streetcars unable to navigate around a motor vehicle blocking their tracks. “The arrival of private automobiles quickly gummed up streetcar efficiency and made them much less competitive and comfortable,” Nicholas Bloom, a Hunter College urban historian and the author of The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight, told me in an email. “Streetcars lacked exclusive rights of way, so exploding auto traffic dramatically slowed streetcar service.” Automobiles also enabled many city residents to relocate to suburbs unreachable by transit. By the 1950s, American streetcar service had collapsed. In 1960, just 12 percent of commutes to work occurred on transit; by 2019, the share had tumbled to 5 percent.

The aftermath of these early auto-centric decisions still reverberates today, causing cities to become dirtier, more dangerous, and less fun. More than half of the land in many downtowns is used to move and store motor vehicles, occupying space that could otherwise accommodate housing, retail, playgrounds, and parks.

Many cities are now taking steps to correct past mistakes. Last year, Denver voters passed a referendum that will allocate millions of dollars to improve sidewalks. Striving to make public transportation competitive with car trips, Phoenix and Madison, Wisconsin, are planning their first bus-rapid-transit lines. (Such moves could have aided streetcars a century ago.) In recent years, California, Nevada, and Virginia have moved to decriminalize jaywalking. Progress is gradual, but it is real.

Autonomous vehicles threaten that momentum, for the simple reason that self-driving cars are still cars. Whether operated by a human or software, automobiles generate pollution, require traffic lanes, and endanger pedestrians and cyclists.

One member of Safe Street Rebel told me he agreed with AV boosters that self-driving cars could make car trips easier than ever—which is exactly the problem (he asked to remain anonymous because of the dubious legality of the group’s activities). “We have these two competing visions for the future of transportation,” he said. “We’re now talking about tearing down sections of freeways in San Francisco, but AVs go completely against that, because they need that road space to go quickly. If we have more AVs, do we have to keep those freeways? Or can we invest in better transit, so we don’t need those freeways?”

[Joshua Sharpe: We should all be more afraid of driving]

Norton, the University of Virginia historian, thinks the San Francisco activist’s concerns are valid. “Once we have streets with robotaxis, there is definitely a risk that the city feels that it doesn’t have to supply basic public transportation,” he told me. In fact, such views have already been shared. “Don’t build a light rail system now. Please, please, please, please don’t,” Frank Chen, a partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told The New York Times in 2018. “We don’t understand the economics of self-driving cars because we haven’t experienced them yet. Let’s see how it plays out.” The year before, officials in Miami-Dade County, Florida, cited autonomous vehicles as a reason to refrain from expanding public transportation.

But any suggestion that the vehicles will significantly improve mobility on their own seems fanciful. A few years ago, researchers provided 13 Bay Area volunteers with a personal chauffeur who would bring them wherever they liked, mimicking the experience of accessing a self-driving car. During their week with the chauffeur, the test subjects traveled a whopping 83 percent more car miles than they did previously. Autonomous vehicles would be an environmental disaster if they induced anywhere near that much extra driving. They could also create unprecedented gridlock on highways and streets.

Shladover, the Berkeley research engineer, thinks such fears are overblown. “It depends on how the self-driving cars are used,” he said. “If they are deployed in ways that are complementary to transit, such as serving parts of the city that have minimal transit access, that is a significant plus.” But would for-profit companies focus on so-called transit deserts, or would they cater to the needs of a smaller subset of wealthier customers? For AVs to complement transit lines, urban residents must be willing to hop into robotaxis with strangers. That assumption is built into Cruise’s small, podlike Origin shuttle vehicle, but the troubles of Uber Pool and Lyft Line cast doubt on the idea.

Even if AVs do live up to their hype technologically, their long-term effect on cities is hard to predict. “While there’s a lot of data indicating that AVs can contribute to overall safer streets, the reality is that they exist in a transportation ecosystem and are not a panacea,” Drew Pusateri, a Cruise spokesperson, told me in an email. “We need a much broader approach to road safety that includes more investments in mass transit, wider, slower roads and a variety of other solutions.” But the past century suggests that when a transportation system is built primarily for cars, people using other modes get short shrift. That may remain true even when the cars are driving themselves.

In San Francisco, public officials and activists are raising fundamental questions about the desirability of autonomous vehicles within cities—questions that have seldom been aired in public. Instead, elected officials seeking an aura of innovation in states such as Texas and Arizona have actively pursued early AV deployments, minimizing regulations and shunning hard questions. Only now, in California, are robotaxi companies finding themselves in the unfamiliar position of playing defense in the public arena.

Regulators at the CPUC and elsewhere should encourage a vibrant public dialogue around autonomous vehicles, and learn from it. The worst thing they can do is rush decisions to scale an alluring new technology whose downsides could be catastrophic.