The last time we pulled the controls out of a machine and asked the public to trust it, people refused to get in. For decades.
Push-button elevators existed by 1900. Nobody would ride one without an operator standing at the lever. It took an elevator strike in New York in 1945, with office workers climbing stairs for days, before building owners forced the issue. The elevator companies added a big red stop button and a recorded voice telling you everything was fine. Within about ten years the operator was gone.
On Friday Tesla opened Cybercab rides to the public in Austin. Two seats. No wheel, no pedals, no mirrors, nobody from Tesla in the other seat. 45 of them registered in Texas so far. And up by the dome light, a red button that calls Robotaxi Support.
Same trick, eighty years later.
I build agentic systems for a living and every one I ship still has a steering wheel. Approval gates. A queue a human reads before anything goes out. Clients want it, and honestly so do I. Zoox has been running wheel-less pods around Las Vegas for a year, but Tesla is the one talking about building 125,000 a year. That only works if you believe a wheel nobody uses is theatre, and theatre is expensive to build.
Why it's Material - the car is the least of it. The wheel was the last place a person could overrule the machine, and its removal just went into production. The elevator was just as safe in 1944 as it was in 1946. What changed was a button and a voice. The wheel goes, the button stays, and deciding which is which is still a human job.
Worth remembering the next time someone asks you to take the human out of the loop.
Clips originally posted on X by Chris GPT, Jeff Lutz, Rima Sukhadia and Cyber Owl.
