Waymo is almost live in Philadelphia and nobody is talking about what happens next

Waymo is actively testing its sixth-generation autonomous vehicles in Philadelphia as of early 2026, focusing on Center City. Trained specialists are still overseeing the cars for now but the company is preparing for fully driverless public ride-hailing operations.

No official launch date has been announced. PennDOT is working through the approval process. Once it launches, you book through an app and a robot picks you up. That is where we are headed.

Previous Waymo-Philly Coverage:

Good luck to Waymo, who plan on testing the roads in Philly >>

Here is what nobody wants to talk about….

Tim Dillon brought this up on a recent podcast and while you might not consider him a reliable source on societal collapse, the observation he made is impossible to argue with.

Homeless people are already living with the robots. Whatever you think about the homeless, you might want to reconsider the way they have been treating the robots because all things considered, the majority of incidents show the first line of resistance to what is shaping up to be a very bleak future for the rest of us.

Homeless are the only ones on the streets at 3 AM when your delivery robot is coming down the sidewalk. They are the ones watching the Waymo cars roll up and down city blocks at night completely driverless.

There is nobody else out there. The homeless population is the first line of defense between functioning society and the autonomous future and right now, they are completely alone in that position.

We are already seeing what happens when those two worlds collide. In San Francisco in July 2024 a man filmed himself yelling at a Waymo, got confrontational, and later attacked the person filming him and fractured their skull.

In February 2024 a couple inside a Waymo felt trapped when someone blocked the car and attempted to cover its sensors.

In December 2025 a man was found inside the trunk of a Waymo in Los Angeles that a previous rider had accidentally left open. In Phoenix and San Francisco there have been ongoing incidents of people harassing and goofing with the cars.

Waymo’s advice to passengers during these encounters is to stay inside the vehicle.

That is one company in a handful of cities. Now scale it up.

What happens when Peter Thiel deploys his robotic police force in American cities? Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies, which provides AI-driven surveillance software to law enforcement through its Gotham platform.

It integrates license plate readers, bank records, personal data, and real-time tracking into a single system that lets police map relationships and monitor individuals at scale. That infrastructure already exists.

The autonomous enforcement layer is the next step and when it arrives, who do you think gets targeted first? The people with addresses and lawyers or the population that is already invisible to the system?

The homeless are going to get absolutely terrorized by autonomous security forces. That is not a guess. That is the logical conclusion of the trajectory we are already on. And it is not going to stay contained to the people society has already forgotten. It never does.

And guess what? YOU are responsible for training the robots.

Pokemon Go sold thirty billion images that are now being used for mapping and delivery infrastructure. The next app you download for fun could be contributing to mapping a drone route or a robot patrol pattern through the neighborhood next to yours.

You are already in the trenches. You just have not noticed yet because the early casualties are people you walk past without making eye contact.

Waymo is coming to Philadelphia. It sounds fun but maybe we should all pay attention to what comes with it.

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