Dan Avedikian’s recent ride across San Francisco in a driverless car was a mostly uneventful experience.

But at one point, the robotaxi did something the 37-year-old music educator wasn’t expecting: The car signaled as if it were going to turn left at an intersection, but then didn’t.

Avedikian said human drivers often do things like this — make choices that don’t seem to make sense right away.

“Like, big whoop,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing I do all the time.”

But it’s not what he expected from a robot.

“Because the robot should be perfect, right?” he said.

Setting expectations

Alphabet-owned Waymo, one of the most prominent self-driving car companies, recently announced the expansion of its service to Atlanta and Austin early next year. This means many more people are about to see the Silicon Valley company’s vehicles on their city streets. In San Francisco, Waymos are already ubiquitous. But riders can find the experience unsettling, especially when the ride isn’t perfect.

“When we talk about autonomous vehicles, the purported benefit is that it is a better driver than we are,” said Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist with the global policy think tank RAND Corporation who studies driverless cars.

She said it’s the driverless car companies themselves that set the public’s high expectations. “Their claim is this is going to be an extraordinary experience,” Karla said. “This is going to be safe. This is going to be easy.”

Waymo’s advertising campaigns feature lines such as, “The Waymo driver will take care of you and keep you safe from Point A to Point B, whether it’s your first ride or your hundredth one.”

Driverless cars do seem to be safer in some situations. A recent study from the University of Central Florida states: “It is anticipated that the automation of systems will significantly reduce the number of accidents, as human errors contribute up to 90% of accidents.”

But the research also shows there’s not enough data to really know: “Despite the recent advancements that Autonomous Vehicles have shown in their potential to improve safety and operation, considering differences between Autonomous Vehicles and Human-Driven Vehicles in accidents remain unidentified due to the scarcity of real-world Autonomous Vehicles accident data.”

A tricky balance

Waymo is trying to strike a tricky balance between the image of seamless machine performance that the company projects and a friendly and familiar experience that earns the public’s trust.

“There are a lot of things that we do that are very human-like,” said Ryan Powell, Waymo’s head of design and customer research.

Powell cites Waymos’ careful negotiations at intersections as one human-like characteristic.

“We might nudge a little bit forward as a way to signal to the other drivers or to the pedestrians that we’re about ready to take that turn,” he said.

There’s also the warm, safety-conscious in-car voice, which reminds passengers to, “Please make sure it’s clear before exiting.”

The human-but-not-quite factor

For some, that disembodied voice is unsettling.

“It’s got this kind of inhuman friendliness,” said New Yorker cartoonist and author Amy Kurzweil. Kurzweil’s work, such as her 2023 graphic memoir Artificial: A Love Story, explores human-machine relationships; in a cartoon for The New Yorker, she poked gentle fun at autonomous vehicles and the people who ride in them.

Amy Kurzweil’s autonomous car cartoon, published in the Apr. 4 2016 issue of The New Yorker.

Amy Kurzweil

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Amy Kurzweil

Kurzweil said she has taken Waymos a couple of times in San Francisco, and that she enjoys the experience, but she said the uncanny feeling stretches beyond just the voice — for example, the steering wheel spins without anyone sitting behind it.

“That’s triggering our nightmare sense that there should be somebody there, and there isn’t,” she said.

This ghostly echo of the human driver who isn’t there taps into peoples’ deep-seated fears about machines possessing a kind of human consciousness.

“Because we’re often slotting robots into human jobs and human roles, we have this little background nightmare of them as actually having human agency, which they don’t have,” said Kurzweil. “And there is something about the driverless car that is a really good symbol for that anxiety.”

Kurzweil traces the anxiety back to R.U.R — Rossum’s Universal Robots, a 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Čapek. It tells of a deadly uprising of artificial, humanlike beings who were created by humans to do their grunt work. These types of stories keep playing out in our culture, from the awe-inspiring Replicants in the 1982 movie Blade Runner, to last year’s horror film Megan about a scary AI doll.

Kurzweil said she wonders if doing away with the elements we associate with having a human chauffeur might, paradoxically, make riders feel more comfortable.

“If the machine didn’t have a driver’s seat and it didn’t have a steering wheel, it would be less uncanny,” Kurzweil said.

Waymo’s Powell said the company would like to get rid of these things, too. But despite a 2022 regulatory action that paves the way for this possibility, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration still requires them — for now.

Jennifer Vanasco edited the audio and digital versions of this story; Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.

As contemporary Angelenos, seeing the immersive “Little Women Ballet” might be as close as we’ll ever get to stepping into a time machine.

The series of dance works about Louisa May Alcott’s beloved 19th century novel are staged inside the stately Victorian homes of Northeast L.A.’s Heritage Square Museum. Dancers and actors are dressed in period-inspired costumes, from cap-sleeve pioneer dresses to Steampunk-style fashions. Before each performance, the scene is set by a narrator who speaks in a prim, puritanical accent reminiscent of a bygone era. And the production demands the audience’s full participation: as guests, we’re invited to do everything from visit the homes of the novel’s March sisters to step in to play roles to advance the plot.

We begin by splitting off into small groups and following along as a character — in my group’s case, the girls’ wealthy Aunt March — leads us into the various houses where the ballet will be staged. The show is intimate — dancers are not even two feet away from audience members, who are granted limited seating and space to stand in the small rooms. They’re so close that you can hear the muffled sounds of their ballet shoes on the carpet and can make eye contact, which feels both intimate and mildly discomfiting.

Directed and choreographed by Emma Andres, the experience kicked off in May with a spring iteration before bowing its autumn production last month. In late November, the series will conclude with a winter immersive before staging a full-length version of the story at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in December.

The trilogy emerged organically. “We wanted to take this project in steps to see how it was going to grow and be received by audiences,” Andres said. “When I originally created the spring immersive, I did not know that I would be creating autumn and winter as well.”

Andres created the work with the intention of making space in ballet for more stories focusing on women. “The story of ‘Little Women’ is complicated, but I felt that it would be great for narrative ballet,” she said. “I see myself in all four of the sisters and I felt that they were a group of young ladies who could be inspiring for young audiences to watch and take influence from. Even though they come from a time that’s 100 or so years before our own, they still have very relatable traits to us in 2024.”

Ellen Relac and Alberto Hernandez, as Meg March and John Brooke, perform in a room of the L.A. Heritage Museum.

Constructed during the Victorian era, the Heritage Square Museum is in many ways the perfect backdrop for this production.

“We don’t have the privilege of being in Concord, Mass., where Louisa May Alcott grew up, but I feel like Heritage Square really shows where we developed our performance, which was California,” Andres said.

Dancing in the antique homes required careful planning. Luckily, it turned out that pointe shoes moved easily across the carpet-covered floors. “[The carpet] kind of acts like rosin so it provides this friction that’s actually really nice and never slippery,” Andres explained.

However, there were other design challenges, particularly the low-hanging chandeliers. To prevent a catastrophe, the team measured all of the rooms and taped down the dimensions in their home studio of Pasadena Civic Ballet. The dancers also walked the space and noted every piece of furniture and potential pitfall during a dress rehearsal.

Denise Moses as Aunt March introduces a scene before a group of guests.

Andres grew up dancing with the Pasadena Civic Ballet, which she attended from the age of 4 through 18. “It’s a very unique studio, because they create all their own ballets,” she said, including interpretations of Disney titles like “Peter Pan,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Snow White” and “Alice in Wonderland.”

The company has been directed by Diane De Franco Browne, Tania Grafos and Zoe Vidalakis since 2000. Browne served as production advisor on this project. “I watched these three really creative women come together and create a very inspiring and creative environment growing up,” Andres said. “I think that a lot of my passion for the arts came from watching them as I grew up.”

Guests congregate outside of one of the Victorian buildings that comprise L.A.’s Heritage Square Museum.

The Pasadena native graduated from UC Irvine in 2020 with a BFA bachelor of fine arts degree in choreography and a minor in literary journalism. After the pandemic hit, Andres moved back to Pasadena and became manager of Pasadena Civic Ballet, helping it build several outdoor dance studios to keep dance going live. “Even though I was really happy to be coming back, it was very difficult having all of our students on Zoom. But luckily we transitioned back to live pretty quickly,” said Andres.

It was during that time that she first conceived of the idea for a “Little Women”-themed ballet. Cooped up inside, she watched Greta Gerwig’s 2019 take on the classic work and soon after screened all three previous feature-length film adaptations (from 1933, 1949 and 1994) and read the book.

“I’m glad I [first] read it when I was older because I feel like I related to it way more than I would have as a child,” Andres said. “I feel like translating it into a ballet is a way that younger audiences can really relate to it and the emotions of the characters and their personalities.”

She began by crafting a six-minute summation of the book for Pasadena Civic Ballet in 2021, featuring students at the school. “I tried to target key points in their lives,” she said. “I went directly into Jo meeting Laurie and then directly from there, the relationship between John and Meg. Because when Meg starts to fall in love, that’s the first time that Jo really sees that their family could come apart when people start growing up.”

From left, Chris Flores, Evan Hernandez, Ross Clark, Jacob Robleto and Alberto Hernandez perform in the immersive “Little Women Ballet.”

She established each character’s personality visually by creating recognizable dance motifs for each of the sisters, which live on in the current production. “Each of the sisters has a pose that they do that symbolizes their interests and personality,” Andres said. “Jo holds her hands up like she’s reading a book, Amy like she’s painting a canvas with a paintbrush, Beth’s on a piano and then Meg’s are up by her face to symbolize an acting mask.”

Dance sequences were created to illustrate scenes in the girls’ lives including Amy and Laurie’s courtship in Paris, Beth’s final days with Jo and Jo’s romance with professor Fredrick Bhaer.

‘Little Women Ballet’ returns for two performances this winter

The winter immersive runs Nov. 22-24 at Heritage Square Museum. Tickets are $60. The full-length ballet will be held Dec. 7 at Wilshire Ebell Theatre. Tickets start at $28. For more information, visit littlewomenballet.com

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Andres made a deliberate choice for all the sisters to dance on pointe — except for Jo, a character who is unconventional in her tomboyishness. Jo dances with flexed feet.

“Some of our dancers are not pointe dancers, but they are excellent ballet dancers,” she said. “If I feel that someone will play the character really well, that is more important to me than them doing pointe. But my hope for the full-length is that it will just be Jo not wearing them, to emphasize the idea that she’s not only breaking societal norms as a woman of the time, but she’s also breaking ballet norms.”

The show itself is doing the same.

Madison Marsh performs as Amy March. Dance sequences were created to illustrate scenes in the sisters’ lives.

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