Autonomous cars have been under development by various companies for decades, but the industry’s modern era exploded out of a series of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency competitions in the 2000s, when a few university teams, funded by the military, began to make huge progress on self-driving vehicles. Breakthroughs in technology, mostly in the laser-range-finding systems known as LIDARs, allowed the cars to understand the three-dimensional space of the world. Mapping projects from Google and others helped encode human rules of the road for machine consumption. And, of course, in recent years, ever more computation and the use of machine-learning models have improved visual processing tasks like pedestrian detection.

The driverless car is a monument to our age, synthesizing everything that Silicon Valley can be: brilliant, farsighted, rapacious, data-hungry, convinced of machine competence and human fallibility. It is tech’s will to change the world made manifest, and it will—eventually, almost certainly—reshape cities in the most mundane and significant ways.

In preparing for Waymo’s continuing deployment, Chandler’s planning commission hewed to the mundane: The primary change it considered was a 10 percent reduction of parking in exchange for developers constructing dedicated pickup and drop-off locations. Such civic administrivia could obscure the fundamental, astounding new fact of the world: Waymo One is an autonomous-car taxi service that normal people—hundreds, then thousands—will use to summon robots for a quick ride to Dee’s Dancewear or volleyball practice or Walmart. There will be many firsts along the way to the self-driving future, but this is the end of the beginning.

Last week, I crossed the sunny street, got in to the backseat of a Waymo minivan loaded with far more computing power than an early-’90s supercomputer, and hit a big blue button marked Start Ride in English and braille. There was a guy in the front seat, young and ponytailed, but he did nothing but go along for the ride, hands off the wheel.

The car took off down the street, destined for a strip-mall bar called the Priceless Prime Time, one of a handful of destinations that Waymo allowed us to go to as part of a press preview of the technology. It got to a stop sign at Arizona Avenue, the name for busy Highway 87, which pulled this town into existence as a crossroads outside a still-tiny Phoenix. Traffic surged past us, and the car waited patiently—maybe a hair too patiently—and then pulled out and merged with the stream of dumb machines heading north.

Inside the car, none of the technologies that make the service work were particularly obvious. There was a screen in front of me, and it showed an abstracted view of what the car “sees”: how it synthesizes all of its inputs into a sense of where it is, what else is there, and where it needs to go. The screen is, essentially, a map drawn by engineers imagining what a normal human would want to know about how the robot he has temporarily entrusted his life with understands the world.

It shows the shape of the road in perfect detail, a bright little model of the minivan pursuing the line of its path through the world. Other vehicles are shown as blue rectangles. Every four seconds, the rest of the world comes briefly into existence: a line of palm trees, the curve of the newish Chandler Center for the Arts, a psychic’s squat little parlor, the halal-market parking lot—there, then gone. People are shown as three-dimensional clouds of gray points moving atop a circle; they shimmer like a movie ghost or a school of tiny fish. I found myself looking out the windows to remind myself of the solid volume of the humans dressed in flesh and clothes on their way to the pharmacy.

Given the ubiquity of ride-hailing apps now, riding in a self-driving car is surprisingly natural, even boring. That is, until you notice the wheel turning on its own while the guy monitoring the vehicle sits with his hands on his thighs. It’s enchanting and unnerving, like a spirit is driving the car. When Alphabet, GM Cruise, Uber, and other companies investing in autonomous cars evangelize the technology, they present it as a way to escape the tedious, dangerous moil of driving. But encountering the technology in the field, on actual city streets, doesn’t trigger the exciting pang of future freedom. Instead, it produces a stranger feeling: discomfort that an ethereal intelligence inhabits the human world.