I’ve spent more than a decade working in AI. I’ve built teams around it, led products powered by it, and spent more hours than I can count thinking about where it creates value and where it doesn’t. I’m not a skeptic. I’ve seen what the technology can do when it’s applied well.
I’m also the father of a son with epilepsy. He is sixteen, and he will probably never drive. Autonomous vehicles have been part of how I think about his future for a while now — not as a certainty, just as a possibility worth holding onto. So when I came across a Freakonomics podcast about what a driverless world might mean for people who can’t drive, I expected something that confirmed what I’d been quietly hoping. Instead it pulled in two directions at once.
That tension is what this post is about.
What One Hand Gives
The podcast — Freakonomics, on what a driverless world means for who loses and who wins — opened with autonomous vehicles and the disabled community. The argument was straightforward: people who can’t drive because of a medical condition, a physical limitation, or age could gain something they don’t currently have. Independence. The ability to get somewhere on their own, without relying on someone else to take them.
He watches his friends talk about permits and practice drives the way he watches a lot of things — from the outside, quietly, waiting for the conversation to move somewhere else. His neurologist answered his question about driving carefully, the way doctors do when the answer is “probably not.” He sat there and took it. Part of him probably already knew. Part of him was hoping for something different.
Autonomous vehicles could change that. Not immediately, and not without the kind of infrastructure buildout that takes years and political will. But the technology is real, and the benefit to people like my son is real. Independence is not a small thing. The ability to get yourself somewhere — to a job, to a friend’s house, to somewhere you chose to go — is something most people take for granted until you watch someone go without it.
What the Other Hand Takes
The same podcast also covered job displacement. The ways AI and automation are eliminating work — particularly at the lower end of the labor market. Self-checkout replacing cashiers. Algorithms replacing roles with structure and repetition that don’t require specialized credentials.
Those are the kinds of jobs that could work for my son.
Not because his ambitions are small — they aren’t. He wants to be involved in hockey. He enjoys streaming. But the realistic path to employment for a young man with his challenges runs through jobs with clear structure, consistent routine, and the right support in place. Those are exactly the roles that technology is actively eliminating right now, while autonomous vehicles are still years from being ready to give him a ride to work.
The same wave of technology that might eventually give him independence is already taking away the places that independence could take him.
Who Holds the Asymmetry
The uncomfortable thing I keep coming back to is this: the people most likely to benefit from autonomous vehicles in terms of accessibility overlap significantly with the people most harmed by the job displacement that AI is already causing. The disabled community. People without advanced credentials. People whose realistic employment options are concentrated in exactly the kinds of repetitive, structured roles that automation eliminates first.
Technology is giving with one hand and taking with the other. And it is not giving and taking equally or simultaneously. The taking is happening now. The giving is still on the horizon.
I’ve watched this pattern play out before, not with autonomous vehicles, but with technology more broadly. The people and organizations with resources tend to capture the efficiency gains first. The costs of displacement tend to land earliest on people with the least room to absorb them. And the accessibility benefits — the genuinely good things that technology makes possible for people who have been left out — tend to arrive last, after the business case has already been made and the market has already moved on.
That doesn’t make the technology bad. It makes the conversation incomplete.
Both Hands at Once
My son is sixteen. I don’t know what the world looks like when he’s thirty. I don’t know which promises will have been kept and which will have turned out to be convenient arguments for something that primarily served other interests. I don’t know if the door that technology seems to be opening will still be open when he gets there, or what will be on the other side of it.
What I know, from more than a decade of working in this space, is that the people who build and deploy these systems are mostly not thinking about my son. They’re thinking about markets, timelines, and competitive position. Accessibility is a real benefit, but it is also a useful argument. The disabled community being invoked to make the case for autonomous vehicles is both genuinely served by that technology and, as one voice in the podcast put it, conveniently useful to people with other interests.
I hold both of those things at the same time. I have to, because my son is real and the technology is real and the displacement is real.
The honest version of being pro-technology is not pretending that every advance is a net positive for everyone. It’s being clear-eyed about who benefits, who absorbs the cost, and how much time passes between the two.
Technology gives with one hand and takes with the other. The question worth asking — the one I don’t hear often enough in boardrooms or policy discussions or podcast episodes — is whether the same people are on the receiving end of both.
For my son, right now, the answer is mostly no.
And I’m paying attention to which hand moves first.
This post grew out of a more personal reflection I wrote on epilepsydad.com, where I write about life as the father of a child with epilepsy. If this piece resonated, you can read that one here: The Water Level: Disability and Technology.