What we talked about
Ben Seidl, CEO of AutoLane, delve into the transformative world of autonomous vehicles. Discover how these innovations are set to revolutionize mobility and logistics, reshaping our cities and daily lives. From the challenges of integrating autonomous technology with existing infrastructure to the potential for cars to become personal assistants, explore the exciting future of transportation and its profound implications for society.
Show notes
Ben Seidl bought a Tesla in August 2024 with no background in automotive and became so convinced autonomous vehicles would reshape commerce that he built a company around the problem most people hadn’t noticed: self-driving cars have no way to follow the rules of private property. His target for a fully autonomous commerce transaction, a car picking up a grocery order and driving home alone, was Christmas 2024.
What we covered
- Waymo has already surpassed Lyft in ride-hailing market share in San Francisco with a fleet of only around 300 vehicles in the Bay Area. Ben used this data point to argue that autonomous mobility is not a future scenario, it has already arrived on the ride-hailing side, but that logistics and commerce remain almost entirely untouched.
- The core problem AutoLane is solving is coordination on private property. When a Waymo arrives at a Chick-fil-A with no precise GPS coordinates or rule set for that parking lot, it makes a non-deterministic decision and, if that decision fails, it gives up, parking illegally or blocking traffic, because there is no framework for it to negotiate the way human drivers do with eye contact and gestures.
- AutoLane’s role is to translate a business’s intentions, where it wants autonomous vehicles to enter, which stalls to use, in what sequence, into approach vectors, GPS coordinates, and data labels that get fed back to AV companies. McDonald’s can set rules; AutoLane turns those rules into code that Waymo can actually follow.
- The compliance asymmetry is a major selling point for property owners. Human drivers ignore DoorDash pickup zones constantly because they have no incentive to comply. Autonomous vehicles, given precise instructions, will follow them 100% of the time, giving a property owner a level of control over vehicle flow that has never existed before.
- Ben described the Costco parking lot as a model for what autonomous vehicles make possible: send AVs through the most inconvenient entrance, park them furthest from the store, and reserve the best spots for human shoppers who are actually in a mood to spend money. The vehicle doesn’t care about inconvenience; the customer does.
- His broader argument is philosophical: most of the errands Americans run could already be completed without their physical presence, the only reason they go is because the car can’t drive itself. Recovering that time, he believes, is where technology’s real social value lies, allowing people to spend more time on things that provide meaning rather than on tasks that simply need to get done.
About Ben
Ben Seidl is the co-founder and CEO of AutoLane, a company building the operating system for curbside autonomy. AutoLane creates the physical and digital infrastructure that allows autonomous vehicles to interact with businesses on private property, enabling autonomous commerce transactions.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benseidl
- Website: https://www.goautolane.com
Episode 39 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the Prevetted Podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Our guest today is Ben Seidel. He’s the co-founder and CEO of AutoLane. AutoLane is a company building the operating system for curbside autonomy. Hello, Ben. How are you doing today?
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (00:18) Hi Federico, I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me. This is exciting.
Federico Ramallo (00:21) Great, great, yeah, I’m happy to have you here. So let’s talk a little bit about AutoLane. How you came up with the idea of AutoLane and what are guys doing at AutoLane?
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (00:34) Yeah, so the origin story has to do with the fact that I bought a new Tesla last year, 2024 Tesla, and previous to that, this was August of last year, so about a year from next week, previous to that I had no experience with autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars, automotive in general, but my brother-in-law,
highly recommended a Tesla and said that the self-driving features that it had were amazing and that he thought it was the best car in the world. And so I kind of took his word for it and bought one of those sight unseen. And the first day that I got it and started using the full self-driving features, I was astounded. And it became really clear to me
quickly within the day, honestly, that this was the future of mobility and transportation, and that this technology would be ubiquitous. It would be in every brand new car in the future, or in most. All OEMs, Toyota, Ford, GM, would clearly be selling a similar type of technology in their new cars in the future. And so…
I kind of became obsessed with the idea that if this is the future of automotive, meaning your car can drive you around, it could drive itself around.
how is that going to change the world? How is that going to change our cities, our consumer behavior, our lives? And that was kind of the rabbit hole that I spiraled down thinking about the second and third order effects of personally owned autonomous vehicle features. And started building AutoLane kind of based on that experience.
Federico Ramallo (02:12) Interesting, So what you’re thinking without a lane is to provide the operating system for different type of autonomous vehicles, from mobility to also pick up services and delivery of services, right?
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (02:28) Yeah, yeah, very much focused though on the idea that these vehicles are already, I mean, if you look at Waymo, I know you’re in San Francisco, you look at Waymo, go to the Presidio, it’s like all autonomous vehicles driving people around. so autonomy is already here from the ride hailing perspective. And if you look at the market share statistics of ride hailing in San Francisco today, Waymo,
has actually passed Lyft in most estimates. So there are more Waymo rides happening in San Francisco than Lyft rides, which is astounding. And that’s happened very quickly. And still with a very small fleet, Waymo has, I believe, around 300 vehicles in the Bay Area. And with 300 vehicles, they’ve been able to do as much market share.
Federico Ramallo (02:55) really?
interesting.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (03:17) transactions as Lyft has been able to do this year. So you’re in a really interesting place where autonomous ride hailing is already starting to dominate. I mean it is moving very quickly and taking a sizable portion of the market. But what you’re not seeing is any impact yet on the delivery or logistics.
side of mobility. And that’s mostly where my head went to. This is my second venture-backed startup that I’ve built and my previous one was called Neighborly. I built that for six years between 2016 and 2022. It was based in the Bay Area and really the idea with Neighborly was that we have all these vacant storefronts in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and
We don’t use retail storefronts in the same way. Most entrepreneurs, you know, start first with an online business or an e-commerce business. And if they get really confident or bullish, they’ll maybe lease a storefront. But leasing a storefront is no longer, you know, a requisite to opening a business. so given that we’ve got all these vacant storefronts and I kind of looked at that same situation as I have with Auto Lane to say like, wow, we have, we have this amazing
asset here that we don’t use to its fullest potential. And so how do we make a marketplace around that? And so I built Naverly up to about 43 locations, I think we had at the peak. And by doing that, I really got to understand the retail world and got to work with some of the top property owners and real estate companies in the country, like a
a Simon Property Group or a Westfield or Boston Properties and those types of large real estate companies who operate the best malls and shopping centers in the country, they are always looking at how technology changes consumer behavior and traffic patterns and activity on their properties. And so as I was building Neighborly, I got this kind of inside peek into that industry and it showed me
It showed me just how intermixed mobility is with retail and real estate. And when Uber Eats and DoorDash started scaling, and you could see how parking lots were being changed and how people were using these properties differently, it was a period of time that allowed me to look at
Federico Ramallo (05:14) Thank
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (05:32) mobility and retail in a way that has helped me understand what to build with AutoLens. You gotta plug your computer in.
Federico Ramallo (05:38) Yeah, I was, was kidding you, but I had to go and pick up the charge.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (05:40) So
yeah, the long story short, really like that journey with Neighborly, my previous business, helped me understand kind of how transportation and retail are intermixed on our high volume properties in the United States. so.
When I looked at autonomy and these self-driving vehicles, I thought, it’s very clear that these vehicles have much more potential than just autonomous ride hailing. And while Waymo is really interesting, I think what’s more impactful is autonomous vehicles that are doing errands, that are doing commerce, that are doing logistics.
And if these vehicles are so good that they can be trusted to drive us around downtown San Francisco with no drivers, why and when are they going to start impacting logistics and retail? They will start picking up packages. They will start picking up your pizzas. They’ll pick up your groceries. They could deliver. They could send back a return that you want to send to Macy’s. mean, these vehicles are so good now that
the question is really when are they gonna start impacting retail logistics? And that’s what I ended up becoming fascinated with when it comes to self-driving cars was not the ride hailing side of it, because that’s happening already, but how will this impact everything else? And we ended up circling in on the idea that the reason
these vehicles aren’t able to do commerce or logistics today is a problem of coordination mostly. So that’s the problem we set out to work on first and what we’ve built at AutoLane today is the initial infrastructure, both digital and physical, that allows autonomous vehicles to interact with businesses on private property. So it’s a platform.
that enables these types of autonomous commerce transactions to take place.
Federico Ramallo (07:26) Interesting, interesting. I see what you’re saying. The potential is more than just people transportation. And the logistics, that’s invisible, not easy to see, is what I’m trying say, not invisible. It’s at first hand, you don’t see it, but then when you see it, the potential is huge, right?
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (07:42) Totally, yeah, and I think the specific vision that I saw that I work really hard every day to make come true is the day when I can send my car to go pick up my groceries and come back home without me having to do anything. And…
That day, I believe, is coming this year.
Federico Ramallo (08:02) really? Wow.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (08:02) Yeah, so for us, I kind of refer to that as AutoLane’s big bang moment. But the day when we are able to orchestrate an autonomous vehicle to go with no people inside of it, to go to a business, pick up an order, and drive it back and deliver it to its owner without any human intervention.
That’s kind of the big bang moment for the business. And that’s the vision that I’ve been working towards since the very beginning, which is I want my car to be able to leave my driveway on its own, go to the pharmacy, pick up my medication on its own, and come back to my driveway and let me know when it’s home. And I can just go outside, pick up my medication out of the car. And that’s that. And I won’t have to pay for that because it’s my car.
I won’t have to babysit that process on my iPhone, like checking it in or calling the pharmacy or doing anything like that. I’ll just be able to press go pick up my order and the rest will be taken care of and I will just be notified when it’s home. And I think that’s the sleek and kind beautiful vision that we’re working towards where your car becomes kind of like your personal assistant.
Federico Ramallo (09:12) Right, right. Yeah, I was going to say delegate and forget. Yeah.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (09:15) Exactly. Because
if you think about like, if you think about a lot of the errands that you do on a daily basis, and then make a list of those and go through each one and see if hypothetically that errand could have been completed without you physically being there.
Usually most of your errands can be done without you physically being there. The only reason you are normally having to go to do them yourself is because the car won’t drive itself. That’s it. It’s not that the business, it’s not that you couldn’t order that online. It’s not that you couldn’t, you know, have someone come bring it out to your trunk at curbside pickup. It’s not any of that stuff. It’s really just like,
I had to go pick up my medication because I have to drive my car there. And so I didn’t have to drive my car there, like actually.
I wouldn’t have to go at all. And most of your errands, most of our errands as Americans are absolutely at that point where they could be fully automated if the car can drive itself. And of course, that’s something like Autoland exists to orchestrate those errands in the background so that you don’t have to babysit the transaction.
Federico Ramallo (09:59) You don’t even have to be there.
Right, right. similar to these logistic centers at Amazon where they have all these little robots that pick up stuff and move them around, right? And it’s an orchestrate system. don’t know where the system finish. The system start and ends because it’s a holistic thing, right? ⁓ That coordinates all together, right?
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (10:35) All right.
Federico Ramallo (10:38) It’s a similar scenario here, where you could have your car but connected to a bigger system. It will allow you to automate a lot of these tasks.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (10:50) Mm-hmm.
Exactly. And so yeah, that’s kind of the crazy, ambitious work that we’re undertaking here at AutoLane on a daily basis. And it’s really fun. mean, it’s exciting to work on leading edge ideas that most people I talk to think are ridiculous or crazy or impossible or stupid. You you name it.
I would say 90 % of investors and people that I’ve spoken with either don’t believe it or believe that this is like a Jetsons thing that won’t happen for 10 years, five years.
What I believe is that we’re a lot closer to this than anyone understands. And now is the time to start building this infrastructure and these tools because…
We think that all this is going to be possible by Christmas. Maybe I’ll be able to send my car to Target to pick up a Christmas gift this year with our autolane system. I think that’s possible. The day that we can pull off that first fully autonomous transaction via the autolane infrastructure is going to be a pretty fun day for all of us.
Federico Ramallo (11:56) Yes, yes. Sounds very fun and very interesting. So here in the Bay Area I have a friend that lives in downtown and he was talking to me about only allowing fully autonomous vehicles within the city.
because that will reduce the number of accidents, that will make the city safer, less noisy, better overall. ⁓ And there’s another component to that, that is when you have autonomous vehicles and drivers interacting together, that level of complexity is much higher than when you have fully autonomous vehicles running around.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (12:19) talk.
Correct.
Federico Ramallo (12:34) because the way
they negotiate and everything, it’s better than what we humans do, right?
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (12:40) Yeah, yeah, and that’s that. I think you touched on a really interesting difference between transportation’s past and transportation’s future. Is that transportation’s past is all based on the idea that the human driver is able to negotiate with the other human driver
in order to mitigate problems or navigate the infrastructure, the roads and the parking lots. And you’ve astutely pointed out one of the really big problems with the combination of human drivers and autonomous drivers is that they can’t, there is no nonverbal or verbal.
communication between those two entities. If you and I are fighting for a parking spot in the parking lot, I can look at you, you can look at me, you can wave me on, you could flip me off, you know, whatever. But you and I are gonna look at each other and use nonverbal or verbal communication in order to negotiate. And that happens all the time in traffic on, you know, in
in parking lots, on freeways. people, transportation is reliant upon the idea that humans will add this additional layer of coordination themselves. We will contribute that coordination via our brains and our human interactions. But if you remove that, you’ve actually removed a core aspect of the system.
that the system is completely reliant upon to mitigate complexity. And that’s why when we look at how autonomous vehicles are interacting on private property today, there’s many, problems that occur with Waymo’s in particular on private property. They’ll show up at a fast food restaurant like a Chick-fil-A and the parking lot’s packed.
and there’s human drivers everywhere and there’s only one Waymo and the Waymo is trying to accomplish something like drop off a passenger or pick up a passenger. And it doesn’t have precise instructions. It doesn’t have precise GPS coordinates. It doesn’t have precise rules. And so it makes a non-deterministic decision when it arrives at that Chick-fil-A restaurant. And there’s no way for anyone else to impact that decision that it will make.
And so you end up in a situation in which if problems are occurring, there’s nothing that can be done. The robot is not able to consider seven different scenarios and go through them and decide based on immediate communication with another human driver, which new decision to make. just, it basically just gives up. If it’s an initial.
If its initial decision or desire isn’t fulfilled, will just do, it will just give up. It’ll throw its hands up and it will park in a bad place. It will park in an illegal place. It will do the wrong thing. It will clog up the parking lot congestion. It doesn’t, there’s no framework, decision-making framework for it to go through if it doesn’t have exact instructions. And that’s what’s missing.
particularly on private property is that we haven’t yet upgraded our city, national and private infrastructure for this new technology. There is, we don’t have rule sets, data labeling, approach vectors, know, LIDAR maps, GPS coordinates. We don’t have any of the inputs that are required to instruct a robotic vehicle correctly.
those vehicles to do what we want them to do. And so that’s one big problem that Auto Lane is solving today, which is starting to translate those rules and systems and desires of, let’s say, a McDonald’s. McDonald’s has an idea of how they would like autonomous vehicles to interact with their property and their business. What we need to do as Auto Lane is take
that vision and those ideas from McDonald’s and translate them into approach vectors, GPS coordinates, particular stalls, systems, data labeling, and instructions to then feed back to the autonomous vehicle company so that they can implement that information into their system so that the next time a Waymo comes to this McDonald’s parking lot, for example, that it behaves and adjusts to the system that McDonald’s would like it to follow.
And so you can’t be upset with these AV companies, nor the AVs themselves, of course, because they literally don’t know any better. And asking McDonald’s to do all of this work for every automobile manufacturer and AV manufacturer isn’t scalable either. And so that’s the major role that AutoLyn plays, is kind of the facilitator in between.
a business like a McDonald’s and an AV company like a Waymo to say, McDonald’s wants Waymo to behave a certain way on this property. Here’s all the data and instructions that your Waymo needs in order to follow McDonald’s rules. And this is private property, it must take place like this. can’t tell McDonald’s, we’re gonna do whatever we wanna do. And our systems are non-deterministic and that’s that. That’s not.
this is private property. And so if you want to enter private property with this, you need to follow the rules of the owner of the property. That’s, and that’s just, that’s just basic common sense. And so, but translating the basic rules and common sense into code is what Autolint is doing at scale. And that’s going to allow for this orchestration to occur.
Federico Ramallo (17:30) you need to follow the rules of the private property.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (17:48) that we know is necessary for this industry of autonomous commerce to even start. That’s one of the reasons why we don’t see self-driving cars interacting with businesses because there is no orchestration layer. so that’s, you’ve kind of hit on the really interesting both problem but also opportunity for the future of transportation, which is.
Because you need to give specific instructions to these robotic vehicles, there’s also the benefit that these vehicles, instructed correctly and accurately, sorry, instructed correctly and in a detailed fashion, unlike a human driver, they won’t disobey. So a lot of our customers or properties that we work with,
They have put these types of systems into place for Uber drivers or DoorDash drivers or ride hailing companies, you know, and they’ll say, these are the particular parking stalls where you have to go if you’re doing ride hailing. These are the Uber zones, these are the DoorDash driver stalls. Here’s how DoorDash drivers are supposed to park. Here’s how they’re supposed to interact with their property. Sometimes they’ll make signs.
You know, they’ll do all types of things to basically instruct human drivers how to interact with their businesses on their property.
But while they do all that work, usually the human drivers will still do whatever they please. And they’ll disobey if they want to, and they’ll park wherever the hell they feel like it. A door dash driver is not gonna follow a sign, because why? They don’t care, and they don’t have to. If there’s an easier way for the door dash driver to do it, to get the job done faster, to make it more convenient for them, to make more money, the door dash driver is going to
to do what’s in the best interest of the door dash driver. And I don’t think anyone should blame that driver. They’re just trying to make their life easier and be more convenient and successful for themselves and rules be damned what McDonald’s says, for example. But with the future of transportation, in this exact example, if McDonald’s sets the rules in a really detailed fashion for autonomous vehicles, the major benefit is that
those autonomous vehicles will follow the rules to a T. And so you end up having like an incredible amount of control and orchestration over exactly how you want vehicular transportation to take place on your property. And that’s an opportunity that has never existed before because humans won’t follow rules 100 % of the time, but robots will if you give them that
Federico Ramallo (19:49) Yes, that-
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (20:10) those instructions. I think that’s both the downside, you know, of not having the rule instructions is that you have chaos. But the upside is that if you do create the rule instructions and put them into code, you will pretty much get 100 % obedience, which is really, really fantastic. Efficiency, exactly. You’ll have, you will have a perfectly coordinated system.
Federico Ramallo (20:27) and inefficiency.
Right, right. if you do it from the private property owner perspective, then you can have more control on changes than you can have on public roads, right? Because that’s going to take longer, right? Yeah. And ⁓ once these autonomous vehicles prove reliable, then things like the drive-through could become
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (20:46) Yep, yep.
Federico Ramallo (20:56) exclusively for autonomous vehicles, right?
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (20:59) Correct.
You could start to create different parts of your property that are specifically designed for autonomous vehicles only. And I think some advice that I give when I’m talking to our customers is, you can start to siphon off the autonomous vehicle traffic and separate it from the human drivers so that your human visitors and drivers are going to have a much better experience at your property or at your business.
Federico Ramallo (21:04) Right.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (21:21) because they hypothetically should be less traffic. So let’s take another example, like a Costco parking lot. Costco parking lots are notoriously ⁓ busy on the weekends in particular. Everybody wants to go at 2 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon and the parking lot is completely full and everybody’s fighting to get a parking spot and everybody’s…
Federico Ramallo (21:33) BC.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (21:45) you know, bothered and upset and rushed and, you know, tempers flares sometimes in those situations between human drivers. And that’s not something that Costco wishes to have, but because then, before you’ve even gotten into the Costco store as a shopper, you’re already pissed off. You’re already frustrated. You couldn’t find parking, circled around five times. You got in an argument with some other person fighting over a parking spot.
You finally got parking and then you had to walk two minutes across a hot pavement to get into the store with your kids. And you’re just not in a good mood already heading into your shopping experience at Costco and you wish that that would have been easier. You’re just not in a good mindset heading into a large purchase. of course, if you’re Costco’s management team, you don’t want that to be the case, but…
They’ve been trying to optimize their transportation flows for decades and there just isn’t a good answer. And so autonomous vehicles provide a really interesting wrinkle in this planning and in this system in the fact that if autonomous vehicles start to show up in increasing numbers to a Costco parking lot, you don’t have to worry about the feelings or experience of an autonomous vehicle.
If an autonomous vehicle has to circle around five times looking for parking, so be it. If the autonomous vehicle has to take the most inconvenient driveway entrance into the parking lot, that might, it doesn’t care. And so all the inconvenient aspects of your parking lot transportation system that Costco may have, they can send the autonomous vehicles to go through that route.
Federico Ramallo (23:06) You wouldn’t care.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (23:19) They can make those vehicles go in the back end of the parking lot where the trucks go. They could make those vehicles park in the commercial zone in the back of the store. They could make those vehicles park furthest away as possible from the store and save all the great parking spots for humans and customers. And they can start to redesign the experience of arriving there totally differently because as…
the volume of autonomous vehicles grows, and the volume of human-driven visits probably diminishes, human-driven car visits diminishes, you then can have a much better experience as a human. There’ll be less traffic, you’ll probably get to park closer, you won’t have to fight for a parking stall as a human, and you’ll arrive and it’ll be just much more calm and probably more delightful. And that’s great.
And that’s, think, in general, like where I hope that…
we go as a society and as a culture with this technology, not just autonomous vehicles, but AI in general, we should be leveraging this technology in order to make our lives better and less stressful and more convenient and more effective and efficient and all these different ways in which technology can improve our lives. That’s what we should be using the technology for.
And like, yeah, will it have an impact on delivery jobs? Probably. I mean, but do people who are doing delivery jobs, is that their life passion? Is that their goal? You know, probably not. Are those people capable of doing much better, higher level things in society? Absolutely. Everybody is capable of doing something more.
if you challenge yourself. And we need more teachers, we need more construction workers, we need more therapists, we need more healthcare workers, we need so many people in more…
kind of just like pressing jobs that where humans really shine, where human interaction is so important, that hopefully we can kind of elevate people from jobs that aren’t very fulfilling, to be quite honest, to jobs that are more fulfilling and maybe hopefully pay more. And so then all of a sudden we’re doing jobs that we like that provide more meaning, we’re getting paid better and the underlying…
day-to-day things that have to happen, like delivery, might be almost free if robots are doing them for us. I mean, if a robot brings you your groceries, the cost of that is just the electricity and a little bit of wear and tear. It’s probably 30 cents of cost for a four-mile round trip delivery of using your autonomous vehicle to pick up your groceries. That’s like 30 cents of electricity. So…
If you start to compound that type of efficiency and savings across our economy, there should be lot of consumer surplus being generated from this technological shift. And that’s what I’m really excited about. I think for us as society is we can start to pull ourselves out of the menial tasks and burdens that are required, like having to drive myself to the pharmacy to pick up my medication because
my car can’t drive itself and I gotta go spend 45 minutes to do that when hopefully next year I’ll never have to do that again. And so that’s 45 minutes, probably on a monthly basis that I can recover of my own time to do something else. Hang out with my family or exercise or cook or do something that makes me happy. Something more meaningful with my time than driving a car to a pharmacy and parking the car and going into the pharmacy and
Federico Ramallo (26:24) Thank
more meaningful,
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (26:41) driving the car back home. I don’t really want to do that. And it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s not really that. don’t, I’ll do whatever. But it’s just that I would rather be doing something else. You know, it’s not a laziness thing, in my opinion. It’s more of just, that’s not how I want to It’s just like I’m a human on this earth for a limited period of time. I would like not to have to spend any of it doing that. That wasn’t something I was excited about doing when I was a kid.
Federico Ramallo (26:55) Its optimization is not laziness.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (27:06) doesn’t make me happy. I’m not when I wake up in the morning, I’m not like, yeah, today I get to go pick up my medication from the pharmacy. That’s not on my list, ideally. And you know, there are lots of things that I don’t get to on my list, that I don’t get to because I don’t have enough time. So if I can get some more time back, then hopefully I can use that newfound time to do the things that that I don’t get to that I would love to do.
just like read my kids, you know, a second story at nighttime or, you know, take my kids to the park early in the morning because I don’t have to go do this other errand that I had to do before work. You know, if I can do more human things and things that make me happy, my life’s going to get better. And I think that’s where that’s where technology is going to shine over the next decade is it’s going to start giving us superpowers and taking the burden off of us of doing.
shit that like, quite frankly, we shouldn’t be doing. And it’s not to say that like,
People that have to do these things today aren’t doing something valuable, are. Delivery is a very important thing today and it will be still for quite some time. So we’ve got to do those things for ourselves today, but we shouldn’t have to going forward. so let’s look at the positive side of, I think, technology and where AI is going and understand that it’s a gift to hopefully remove some of these day-to-day burdens that aren’t of the highest use of human time.
Federico Ramallo (28:25) Yeah, I think that with any revolution, any paradigm shift, there are people that are going to lose their job because now their job became obsolete. But it happened with, you know, in the industrial revolution and so many others, but that there are also new opportunities for jobs that require upscale, but, you know, but they will be able to find other jobs, right? ⁓ The transition could be, you know,
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (28:48) That’s right.
Federico Ramallo (28:51) a little bit troublesome, but we as humans, we adapt to the new situations. We have that ability, right? Yeah, and the people that I’ve talked that are delivering, they’re doing it because they need an income, but it’s not their passion. It’s not like, yes, I want to do this every day because I love it, right? ⁓ So I understand that having a platform that could help
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (29:04) Yes.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (29:15) help us delegate that would reduce the costs, would automate it and would allow us to be more efficient as, you know, as overall, right? As a society and individually we get that time back.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (29:27) Yes, and then we can reinvest that time in other things that make us more human. I think it’s so exciting. I really generally believe we’re in an amazing time to be alive on this earth. we’re gonna see a lot of change in the next 10 years. And as you said, some of it is gonna be hard and disruptive and scary, but as a species, we always tend to…
rise to the occasion and we’ll figure it out and I do think our kids and next generations are going to have even more time to be human. I don’t want to call it free time, but just more time to do art and music and socialize and exercise and cook and sleep. We humans, we were born to eat berries next to the creek.
walk in the woods and hang out by the lake. We weren’t born to work nine to five jobs. No species on this planet was born to work a nine to five job. That’s just something that we have to do today because of the system we’ve constructed for ourselves. that’s not the gift of life is to have a job that you have to do to pay for your life.
That’s a construction, And we have the ability to change that construction, luckily. And it’s a big responsibility, of course, but the benefit is we can hopefully start to deconstruct that and have more time to spend in the way that we were designed to spend it, which is enjoying our lives.
Federico Ramallo (30:50) Yes, I completely agree. mean, being able to have more, you know, on our own time to do more fulfilling tasks, know, activities that give us more happiness, right? The component, it has two components, right? One is the immediate gratification that I’m doing something that I like to do now. And the other one is that it has significant meaning.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (31:02) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (31:15) And that is the significant meaning for each person. But if what you’re doing contributes towards that significant meaning goal, then the immediate gratification that you’re having, it multiplies. And then if you’re doing something that
it’s tedious, you don’t want to do it, but it serves that purpose, then it feels less weary, because you know that you’re doing it for, right? But having those two components, man, that’s happiness, right?
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (31:44) Yes.
Totally. Yeah, you can feel it when you’re fighting against your soul, right? When you’re doing something with your day that you would wish not to be doing. You can feel it’s that the misalignment of meaning and purpose is a physical reaction there that takes place. we’ve all been taught to subdue that feeling.
and block those reactions in order to be productive members of society. So, you know, that’s why so many people have bad drug addictions or are alcoholics or turn to escape vehicles, escape mechanisms, because you’re trying to quell that dissonance that you have. And ⁓
That sucks. Self-medicating to quiet your own internal dissonance of you’re doing something all day long that doesn’t make you happy or doesn’t give you meaning or fulfillment. And the only way you feel like you can overcome that negative emotion or that sadness, I suppose, is by escaping into…
Federico Ramallo (32:31) you
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (32:53) TV or doom scrolling or alcohol or whatever addictions that we have, escaping into something in order to avoid the deeper realization that you’re trying to escape because…
You’re acknowledging the fact that you’re doing things that aren’t making you happy, and you’re gonna have to do them again tomorrow and next month and next year in order to pay your rent and in order to pay your medical insurance in this country. In order to put food on your table and take care of your kids, you’re gonna go have to do things, most likely, that you would wish not to do. You would rather do something else today, but…
Federico Ramallo (33:14) Right.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (33:27) You have to go do these things because that’s how our society is constructed. And that dissonance, I think, oftentimes leads to the reason why we have so many mental health problems, especially in this country, which is just like your body and your mind and your soul doesn’t want you to be spending time doing things that don’t provide meaning or happiness to you. And if you accumulate enough of that dissonance, you will start to lash out.
whether at yourself with harmful, harmful escape tactics or at other people, because you’re not happy. You are upset with the way that your life is going and you can feel that deeply. And so I really am optimistic about the idea that technology can continue leading us down a path of more efficiency.
and productivity gains, which should equate to us recouping more time, which then should equate to us spending that time in ways that make us happier or more fulfilled, which then should equate to a better society. like, that’s a cycle and a virtuous circle, I suppose, that I don’t know, I like to believe in and I like to work towards because otherwise, like,
Building technology is pretty meaningless and sometimes even selfish. If the reasons why you’re going to work to build some technology is just because for some personal selfish idea, then I don’t know. I feel like you’re going to run out of energy and determination and grit at some point because things are very hard when you’re building technology on the forefront of…
of the industry, it’s super, super hard and deflating and people won’t believe you. it’s just challenging. But so you have to have some, I believe you just have to have some reason or purpose for why you want to undergo this stress and this workload. And this challenge has to be something more than something for yourself, there has to be a general goal that you’re
moving towards that you wholeheartedly believe will make an impact. And if you can get to that point with any job that you’re making an impact for someone else outside of yourself, that belief is, you I think the fuel that drives our society forward and drives, certainly drives technological innovation, is that people are trying to make the world, you know.
cliche, but trying to work make the world a better place. Like you are trying to make something because you believe that this something that you’re making will impact the people around you in a positive way. And if you don’t have that, just, I don’t know. I don’t know how people do it.
Federico Ramallo (35:42) Thank
Yeah, I I believe that there are some people take drugs or any addiction, right? Could be drugs, be alcohol, could be also gaming sometimes, right? It’s gambling because they want to disconnect from reality because the reality is so worrying for them, right? ⁓ And I was reading
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (36:11) gambling.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (36:21) Something related to that, is what I was talking about is that what they’re looking for is connection because they have a disconnect with their reality. They’re looking for a connection, something that they can, know, a connection with meaning, right? And taking drugs is a way to try to find that, right? ⁓ Yeah. That’s probably a more of a metaphysical, you know, analysis, but yeah.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (36:34) Yes.
That’s right.
⁓ It’s totally it. That’s what I
was trying to get to as well. I think you put it more eloquently than I did, which is that connection, like finding the meaning in you being here on this earth, you being alive. And if we can help each other do that more instead of less over the next couple decades, then things are going to get even better on this planet.
Federico Ramallo (36:49) Right.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (37:06) Things are good. We are safer, more well-fed. know, things are just more stable and more peaceful than they’ve ever been in the history of humankind. We are more prosperous, safer, more peaceful with each other than we’ve ever been in any moment in history. And that gets lost in today’s mainstream media that doesn’t sell.
Federico Ramallo (37:16) Yes.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (37:27) headlines, doesn’t sell clicks, it doesn’t generate the type of attention that mainstream media companies seek. But the facts are that we are actually living in a safer, healthier, more prosperous world than we ever have before. And so that should be comforting, I think, to us that we’re doing a good job. You know, we are making great progress. And it’s not a straight line. you know, fits and starts, ups and downs and
But that arc is bending towards justice, it’s bending towards progress, it’s bending towards health. And that’s pretty cool. And I hope we can just kind of lean into that and keep focused here as this really intense wave of technology in AI.
enters into our world and our society, like, we’ve got to focus. It’s not going to be, this is going to be hard to ingest and absorb because of how powerful the technology is. But I do think if we are thoughtful, if we’re smart, if we’re dedicated, if we work hard, if we take care too, if we’re thinking about all the ramifications of these things that we’re building, then we’re going to be even better off.
And I do see us as, at least in the United States, I do see us taking it seriously. I do see us being thoughtful about the ramifications of these things. And I do see enough.
leaders, in my opinion, that are…
understanding the second and third order ramifications of these tools and these systems and these ideas and not just throwing them out without any regard to humankind or any regard to disruption of society. People are thinking deeply about these issues and that’s comforting to see, you know, that we’re not just going willy-nilly with releasing these tools and concepts into society. We’re taking our time to study them and
making good, thoughtful decisions with groups of leaders and organizations and governments who should have a say in how this stuff is rolled out.
Federico Ramallo (39:18) Yes, yes, I think you painted a beautiful vision of where we’re going, a beautiful vision of, not vision, but you know, picture of where the world is, because I agree that, you know, ⁓ the world is better than what we’re ought to believe by the media. And yeah, I think that there’s been a lot of hope in a lot of people. So I’m
Happy to hear and share your hope because I think that there is a lot of potential for us as a society to do better. And we are in a really great position if you compare historically. And we have the potential to become better. I think AI is going to change, help us facilitate this change so we can have more time to do more.
meaningful activities and ⁓ become a better person.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (40:07) love it. Well, this was an amazing discussion, Federico. Thanks for inviting me on the Prevetted podcast. It was awesome to be here. yeah, I would assume we’ll talk again someday in the future. This probably isn’t the last time we’ll have a chat. So it’s great. Thanks for having me.
Federico Ramallo (40:21) Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you Ben for being here and I’ll ping you before Christmas to see if… ⁓ I will ask you like, what did you get autonomously? Awesome, thank you.
Ben Seidl (Autolane) (40:27) You’re gonna hold me to that. All right.
⁓ Sounds good. a
great day. Take care. Bye.