Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 24, 2026
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Back to episode — Episode 1400 Scott Adams - It's My Birthday So Come Say Hi

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ut someday I'll make it to the top hundred birthdays on my own birthday. Would you like to enjoy the simultaneous sip special birthday edition? Yeah, of course you would. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or a chalice to style the occasion. You have a glass vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Thank you. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure,…

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fee when the temperature is just right? It's perfect. Really.

Let's talk about all the things that are coming. So I watch with fascination as the evolution toward self-driving cars. And thank you everybody for the birthday wishes.

So there's a company called Cruise that is pretty far along as a subsidiary of General Motors. They've got a self-driving car that has just got permitted to operate in California, an actual self-driving car. And what's different is this one doesn't require an operator, a human operator, to take the controls if something goes wrong.

So until now we did have self-driving cars, but it required a human to be in the passenger seat to take over. And it looks like this is the first one that's made the next step, and it will be driving literally autonomously. There will be no human there. The car will just pull up, you get in, and go somewhere.

Now, I don't know if I would be the first one to get in this. The fly lady? Well, you're much too nice. Thank you. I don't deserve that literally, but thank you.

And I've been watching this driverless car thing, and what's interesting is there's a whole bunch of companies that are getting into it. And one assumes that someday, I don't know, Apple and Google will have a car, whatever. But it's not going to be like one day they're self-driving cars. It's more like one day you'll drive past one and you'll think, what the hell was that? A car with nobody in it. And then there'll just be more of them.

But one of the questions that I wonder about is what's it like to be a human driver on the highway with some self-driving cars and some human-driven cars? Because correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a big part of driving anticipating what the other driver will do? When you come to a stop at, let's say, a four-way stop, don't you look at the faces of the drivers? That's one of your biggest variables, right?

You look at their faces because if their face is looking at you, you know they saw you. If their face is looking the other direction and they're inching forward, you stop. Because you're not looking at the car, you're looking at the face. What does a self-driving car do? Self-driving cars don't look at faces. So they've got one disadvantage that humans don't have.

But also I can't look at the face of a self-driving car. How long will it take me to learn when the self-driving car recognizes me? Because I want the self-driving car to see me, and I want to know that they see me like a human. So what do you do? It's almost like the self-driving cars need some kind of other option so you can know that they recognize you.

For example, could there be another light or maybe something that shows up in your car? Something that tells you that this other car now has a full understanding of your existence and what you're doing. As long as I know the

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other car knows what I'm up to, I'm okay. But until I know it knows where I am and what I'm doing, I don't know, it'd be hard to trust it. You know, I mentioned this the other day, but it's becoming more and more hardened as a reality. There will be two histories of the pandemic. One history will say, hey, there was a big old pandemic. The other history is what some members of the right are formi…

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