It's not that taxi drivers and truckers are going to become obsolete tomorrow. It's that that happening is such a huge cultural and economic change that we need to start planning for it today if we're going to not destroy the livelihood of millions of people when those industries do become obsolete in five or ten years.

About 20 million jobs disappeared in America last year, although there was a net gain in jobs overall. This is going on all the time.

So if all of America's 11 million professional driving jobs were to disappear over the span of a decade, it would be a blip, not an apocalypse.

Tesla is launching Autopilot 2.0 (in stages) starting in January.

It's still NHTSA level 3, not 4 or 5, but it's a major step up from pretty much anything currently available and will be in consumer's hands. Even more so when the Model 3 comes.

I think you'll be surprised how fast this technology will exit the labs. Just that Google has decided to brand around it is a big indicator that they're growing confident.

But so what? Full autonomy needn't even be a business goal of Waymo. They just want full deployment. Having a system in place which reduces or eliminates many/most of the accident root causes would be worthwhile to install on any vehicle on the road even if it technically had a human driver.

The "goal", such as it is, is to have a technology worth using. It's not to transcribe whichever comic book utopia someone has in mind.

Their stated goal is indeed full autonomy.