I've been taking Waymo taxis, and it's even weirder than I expected

Natalie Peeples for BI

The first thing to know about riding in a robot taxi is that it feels very, very weird.

The second thing to know is that, weirdly, riding in a robot taxi quickly starts to feel completely normal.

The idea of a car that drives itself is as old as science fiction. But the push for autonomous auto tech didn't get underway in earnest until about 20 years ago, when DARPA started running contests to see who could actually build a driverless vehicle. Two years ago...