{"id":1560,"date":"2026-01-20T03:57:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T03:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/?p=1560"},"modified":"2026-02-27T16:16:30","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T16:16:30","slug":"driverless-taxis-in-shenzhen-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/postcards\/driverless-taxis-in-shenzhen-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Driverless Taxis in Shenzhen, China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just across the border from Hong Kong rises Shenzhen, a city of 18 million people that much of the Western world has barely noticed.<\/p>\n

It’s a mind-boggling success in many regards, having grown from a backwater fishing town in 1979 to a megalopolis with, it claims, a window on the future. In some respects it delivers on that promise: After a drone brought us drinks in a park, we hailed a self-driving taxi, for example. And while I know these exist elsewhere, this was my first time consciously putting my life in the hands of unsupervised software. (Yes, I know software doesn’t have hands.)<\/p>\n

But the truly weird thing about being in a taxi with no driver was that it didn’t feel weird at all. Maybe the future is like that.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Left Turn in a Driverless Taxi in Shenzhen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But the truly weird thing about being in a taxi with no driver was that it didn\u2019t feel weird at all. Maybe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[53,278,281,36,102,63,279,280],"class_list":["post-1560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-postcards","tag-china","tag-shenzhen","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-travel-photography","tag-travel-postcard","tag-279","tag-280"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1560"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1573,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560\/revisions\/1573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}