The Teamsters of California is calling for the suspension of Waymo’s operations in the state amid growing safety and job security concerns.

The union, which has 250,000 members across dozens of industries, called on the California Public Utilities Commission on Monday to indefinitely suspend the driverless car company’s license to operate. The demand comes less than two weeks after a Waymo self-driving taxi struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school, triggering a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation.

In a statement, Teamsters California co-chairs Peter Finn and Victor Mineros called the incident a “horrifying wake-up call for California policymakers who have repeatedly ignored the growing list of red flags concerning robotaxis.”

The child, who ran out from behind a large SUV to cross the street, wasn’t injured in the collision. The Waymo had been traveling at 17 miles per hour before the child appeared and reduced its speed to 6 miles per hour before contact was made.

“We are committed to improving road safety, both for our riders and all those with whom we share the road,” Waymo said in a statement last week about the accident. “Our peer-reviewed model shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.”

Waymo has been the subject of previous NHTSA investigations and recalls following collisions. In December, motionless Waymo vehicles clogged San Francisco streets after a power outage.

“Imagine a scenario where more and more of these vehicles are on the street and there’s an earthquake,” said Finn of Teamsters California in an interview. “There’s people trying to evacuate, there’s emergency response, and these things can’t move at all.”

Waymo also poses a threat to Californians who depend on driving jobs for their livelihood, Finn said. As the race to master autonomous vehicle technology heats up, the union is concerned that companies will eliminate human jobs to lower labor costs.

A statewide poll conducted last year by Teamsters California found that more than 80% of respondents were concerned about the impact of AI and automation on job availability.

“This incident is emblematic of the broader goal Big Tech companies have to replace skilled human labor with AI … and force our communities to reckon with the fallout of automation’s shortcomings,” the Teamsters’ statement said.

Kodiak AI, a Mountain View-based tech company, is developing autonomous semi trucks it says will improve safety and efficiency on the roads. Tesla is also working on its robotaxi technology, and Elon Musk has shared ambitions for self-driving cargo trucks.

Teamsters California is leading a legislative effort to require a human operator to be present in autonomous commercial delivery vehicles at all times.

Autonomous trucks could be a safety hazard and could eliminate thousands of jobs, the union said. Driving jobs are among the most common jobs.

“The stakes get even higher when we’re talking about trucks and delivery vehicles,” Finn said. “It feels like the regulators, in this case CPUC and the Department of Motor Vehicles, should have to do more to get a handle on this.”

It can hardly be disputed that science and medicine today are awash in disinformation.

It’s why respected scientists get physically assaulted and hauled before partisan committees in Congress to be smeared. It’s why childhood vaccine rates in some places are plummeting and measles is on the rampage across the country.

Therefore, it behooves us to look at the origins of this outbreak of politically manipulated pseudoscience. Nature has given us a peg, with the death Jan. 13 of former UC Berkeley scientist Peter Duesberg, at 89.

At the dawn of research into what is now known as HIV/AIDS, Duesberg took the heterodox view that HIV was a harmless virus that had nothing to do with AIDS.

“That virus is a pussycat,” he said. He maintained that the cause of AIDS had to be found elsewhere, notably the lifestyles and drug habits of gay men. His claim motivated a phalanx of AIDS deniers, the forebears of the anti-vaccine militants today.

“Duesberg was a pioneer of disinformation on infectious disease,” says John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College and the author of a devastating 1996 takedown in Nature of Duesberg’s claims.

Duesberg’s embrace of a dangerously wrong hypothesis to the point that it destroyed his career is almost a Shakespearean narrative.

The German native built a career in the U.S. as a brilliant virologist with significant discoveries to his credit and long had been revered among his colleagues. But that ended when he entered the HIV wars. By 1996, Richard Horton, then the editor of the Lancet, the British medical journal, could marvel: “He is now perhaps the most vilified scientist alive.”

Some of the adversaries against whom he leveled ad hominem attacks — he accused Anthony S. Fauci, the respected immunologist and long-term director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, of committing mass murder by promoting the use of the highly toxic drug AZT against HIV — could barely hear his name without suffering apoplectic fits. AZT remains part of standard HIV therapies and is estimated to have saved or prolonged millions of lives.

Asked by science journalist William Booth to respond to a Duesberg statement, Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, replied, “I cannot respond without shrieking.” Fauci derided Duesberg’s scientific claims as “absolute and total nonsense.”

But it would be a mistake to think that Duesberg’s baleful influence on medical science will end with his death.

Duesberg’s heirs are all around us. Actually, they’re more than that — they’re now in charge.

As secretary of Health and Human Services, Duesberg’s most highly placed follower, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is presiding over what has become an overtly anti-vaccination and anti-science agency with a stranglehold on government health policy and funding.

“Peter Duesberg was an AIDS denialist,” says Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who was active in the AIDS research community starting in the 1990s. “He is the precursor to contemporary denialists like RFK Jr., who brought AIDS denialism into the 21st century.”

Indeed, Kennedy has embraced the denialist position that HIV is not the cause of AIDS: In a 2023 interview with New York magazine, Kennedy attributed the conclusion that HIV and AIDS were inextricably linked to “phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people,” referring to AZT.

In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy highlighted Duesberg’s depiction of Fauci as an all-powerful scientific panjandrum intent on blocking his grant applications because his findings might be costly for Fauci’s patrons, Big Pharma.

Kennedy also picked up Duesberg’s broader brief against government science agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Duesberg’s claim was that the CDC existed only to drum up medical emergencies so the NIH could solve them, ensuring the continued flow of taxpayer dollars into both agencies.

Starting in the mid-1970s, Duesberg asserted and Kennedy quoted, “‘the CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic’ to justify its existence.”

Kennedy added his own gloss: “Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant.”

One can draw a straight line from that statement to the unapologetic malevolence with which Kennedy treats the CDC and NIH, insinuating that they’re rife with corruption and conflicts of interest. I sought a comment from Kennedy about Duesberg’s influence on his thinking, but received no reply.

Because AIDS isn’t caused by a virus, Duesberg maintained, the antiviral drugs used as therapies were worse than the disease. He specifically targeted AZT, then as now a common component of AIDS therapies.

The publicity his claims received encouraged untold patients to refuse AZT, causing a toll that may number in the millions. Duesberg met with South African President Thabo Mbeki and chaired a South Africa conference on alternative AIDS theories in 2000, and influenced Mbeki to deny AZT treatments for South African patients. That policy contributed to more than 300,000 deaths from AIDS in that country alone.

“That’s his biggest legacy in terms of the death toll,” Moore says.

Duesberg’s intellectual journey points to an eternal question in science: At what point does a theory become so discredited and the empirical evidence against it so strong, that its advocates should be ignored?

For Duesberg, that point may have come in 1989, when he published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlining his position in detail. The article was filled with with so many assertions about virus science that experienced virologists knew to be false that it “closed the book on him,” Moore told me.

But as Jon Cohen of Science magazine would observe, “the press was less skeptical.” Journalists saw Duesberg as an iconoclastic truth-teller because he carried “visible credentials,” as Gallo put it — after all, he was a professor at a leading research university and a member of the elite National Academy of Sciences.

The press feasted on Duesberg’s self-portrayal as the victim of ostracism arising from professional jealousies — a target of cancel culture before that was a thing. But it rang as false then as do those of RFK Jr.’s anti-science appointees who claim today to have been silenced for their unorthodox views while proclaiming their victimhood at university-sponsored symposiums and appearances on Fox News.

Duesberg’s position also appealed to “the unwary, desperate or gullible” with “twisted facts and illogical lines of argument,” Moore wrote in 1996.

He attracted followers eager to make their name by challenging the scientific consensus on HIV and AIDS.

One was Robert Willner, who had lost his medical license in Florida for claiming to have cured an AIDS patient by administering ozone. Willner went on the road with presentations that included his injecting himself with blood from an AIDS sufferer, as if to show that there was nothing to be feared from HIV. (Willner died in 1995 of a heart attack.)

In his 1989 article, Duesberg had insisted that the true cause of AIDS was drug use by abusers and nitrite poppers favored by homosexuals. AIDS had only been discovered and named, he wrote, because “the particular permissiveness toward these risk groups in metropolitan centers encouraged the clustering of cases that was necessary to detect AIDS.”

His advice was that AIDS prevention efforts should be “concentrated on AIDS risks rather than on transmission of HIV,” which — if followed — would have set AIDS research inexorably down the wrong path.

Duesberg kept making his argument well after evidence that the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, causes AIDS became incontestable. It’s on that evidence that AIDS treatment is based today, with spectacular success — with proper treatment, an AIDS patient can live about as long as an uninfected individual. In the old days, an infection was a death sentence.

The memorial page posted by UC Berkeley after Duesberg’s death walked a tightrope in acknowledging his descent into infamy. In its first sentence, it labeled him as a “public controversialist,” a term new to me. It recounted, “In his later years, Peter enjoyed being a maverick and the center of controversy.”

But it candidly addresses the controversies he triggered by noting that his unorthodox stance “was amplified by political leaders to the detriment of public health.”

And it delivers a final verdict that “the scientific consensus is that HIV is indeed the primary cause of AIDS, and that the current suite of anti-retroviral agents is very effective in slowing or halting the progression of the disease and its spread in the population.”

Gavin McNamara has abandoned his keyboard and spends all day talking rather than typing.

He speaks for hours with his computer and phone, sending emails, writing presentations, posting on LinkedIn and even coding through conversations using an AI dictation app from San Francisco startup, Wispr Flow.

The AI punctuates, formats and adapts his rambling into coherent copy. McNamara averages 125 words per minute, which is twice the average typing speed.

“At this point, anything that could be done by typing, I do by speaking,” said the 32-year-old, founder of software agency Why Not Us. “I just talk.”

Across 77 apps, he has dictated nearly 300,000 words in the past five months — that’s equivalent to writing three novels.

California’s tech titans and startups are at the forefront of a movement to use AI and the large language models they are based on to push people to interact with technology using their voices rather than their fingers.

“AI and LLMs have changed the dynamic,” said CJ Pais, the San Diego-based creator of free voice-to-text dictation app Handy. “Using your voice is much faster than typing.”

A mix of independent developers and startups, including Handy, San Francisco’s Wispr Flow and Willow and others, have sprung up to offer accurate voice interaction with artificial intelligence.

The biggest names in tech are also creating new ways for people to partner with AI. Meta’s latest smart glasses rely on voice. OpenAI and Meta have designed distinct personalities for their bots’ voice chats. Even Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are undergoing AI upgrades, which the companies anticipate will have everyone talking to their tech much more.

These free and paid methods for using spoken words with computers have attracted millions of users, including coders, executive assistants, lawyers, content creators, and medical practitioners. Some optimists think the keyboard could become obsolete.

“I’m excited to announce that we’ve removed keyboards from the most prestigious television awards in the world,” Allan Guo, the founder of Willow, said in a post on LinkedIn, noting that the Emmy Awards team used Willow’s voice dictation for sending Slack messages and clearing inboxes faster in preparation for the 2026 awards.

Over the years, big tech companies have adapted many of their products with voice-first features — for convenience. Today’s pivot away from voice as an accessibility feature to a productivity tool.

In late 2022, the maker of ChatGPT started giving away unfettered acccess to its automatic speech recognition model called Whisper, trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual data. OpenAI shared the tech for accurate audio transcription, once a closely guarded big tech secret. Anyone could now download and run high-quality AI transcription for free on their laptop.

The new wave of AI dictation apps uses Whisper as the foundation and builds on top to offer live dictation. While there are free alternatives, paid subscription costs between $8 and $12 a month.

AI-powered dictation is now gaining a toehold among programmers and regular users — and getting people to talk to their laptops. Be it writing emails, sending SMS, designing a website, or giving AIs tasks, early adopters say dictation allow them to work faster, think more clearly, and be more productive.

“The people who’ve adopted voice heavily aren’t going back. Once you’re talking 20 hours a week to your laptop, typing feels like friction,” said Naveen Naidu, the general manager of New York-based voice dictation app Monologue. “Where I think it’s heading: Voice becomes the delegation layer. You speak your intent, and things happen.”

These new AI dictation apps leverage Apple’s advanced chips on iPhones and Macs to run private on-device dictation.

Geoffrey Huntley, an independent software developer, switched almost completely to voice for work in June.

He often starts projects by opening a voice prompt and asking the AI to interview him about his concerns and project requirements before any code is generated.

“I speak to it, like I’m riffing in a jazz band, backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards,” Huntley said. This vocal dance helps refine the specifications, then the AI takes the wheel, and builds software.

Beyond coding, Huntley uses voice to “let it rip” when capturing blog post ideas or messaging, using apps like Superwhisper or Wispr Flow to get a “first dump” of thoughts before moving to a keyboard for final editing.

A growing number of software developers in Silicon Valley are dictating coding instructions for hours at a time instead of typing. The combination of rapidly advancing AI agents that can code for hours, with voice inputs capturing thoughts faster than typing, has boosted their productivity.

Self-described “vibe coder” McNamara built over 25 web apps in a few months, a speed of development that would be impossible without voice instructions.

“I don’t think that [typing], by any means, would be even efficient or effective to get there as fast as I did with talking,” McNamara said.

He used a meandering conversation and a few hours to get AI to build Sprout Gifts, a gifting registry for kids, and an app to appraise any items via photos.

To be sure, AI can make mistakes, and its work needs to be checked.

Meanwhile, wide adoption has brought new inconveniences, as even power users feel awkward talking to their laptops. Crowded open offices are not designed for many people to be conversing with their computers at the same time.

“Love voice, but not in an office setting,” said one user on X. “I dislike talking around other people. I would do it in a closed-door office, or go work in my car.”

McNamara uses headphones so people assume he is on a call.

“It’s like the social hack that I have,” he said.

While it is too early to call whether and when the Qwerty keyboard might follow the ticker tape and fax machines into obsolescence, the velocity toward voice is accelerating, said Dylan Fox, founder of San Francisco-based AssemblyAI, which offers audio models to companies.

“We’re definitely in the beginning of what we think of as like this 10 to 100x increase in demand for voice, AI applications and interfaces,” he said.

For the coder, McNamara, talking more to chatbots has made him a better buddy.

He used to be bad at responding to texts. Now he gets back to friends right away.

“I am so quick to respond, they are like ‘Who’s this guy?’” he said.