But standing inches away from the robot Uber, I’m hit for the first time by the tangible, ordinary reality of that future. This isn’t a test track or a promotional video. Likewise, it’s not San Francisco or Silicon Valley. This is a self-driving car in the belly of car-loving, suburban America.

Few people get to encounter the uncanny feeling of the autonomous transition right now. But in addition to sketching out the technological, ecological, health, and civic impacts of self-driving cars, it’s also time to ponder what it will be like to live with these things in the city. When they cease to be uncanny and just become normal, robocars will alter something just as fundamental, but easier to overlook: the texture of everyday, urban life.

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Uber was a latecomer to self-driving cars; Waymo, Google’s autonomous division, and even Tesla seemed poised to beat it to market. But Uber has been catching up. It moved its autonomous test fleet to Tempe this year, after a dispute with California over permitting. This isn’t the first municipal test of the technology, either. Google tested robot cars in Mountain View for years, before moving its autonomous division to the California’s Central Valley. And Uber also operates an autonomous test fleet in Pittsburgh, where it lured top computer-vision and robotics researchers from Carnegie Mellon to help it transform car services from flex work to automation.

But Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has been especially supportive of ride-sharing, and particularly of Uber. When Ducey opened Arizona’s doors to Uber, the company accepted the invitation.

Uber tells me that real-world operations are critical to the success of its self-driving program. Its Tempe drivers help the company identify improvements to the technology, specifically those that might address rider interest and concern. Actually, Uber doesn’t call them drivers, but “pilots” or “operators” instead. The company requires the crews, some of whom worked previously as Uber drivers, to pass a three-week training process before putting them behind the wheel of an autonomous car. Pilot seems aspirational, now that I’m looking at one in the flesh from the median. Operator is a little startling to hear in reference to automobiles, but it’s accurate, too: Isn’t everyone an operator now, much of the time? The computer does its work while humans coax it along.

In the passenger’s seat of the car in front of me, a copilot holds a laptop visualization of the road ahead, as captured by the LIDAR unit atop the vehicle—the remote-sensing laser used for guidance—and processed by its onboard computers. Like a rally navigator, he’s here to call out actions when needed. The screen is mostly blank, except for the cars and other obstacles, which glow red—the color of threats.

Since robot cars are new and unproven, their every error is judged harshly. In March of this year, one of Uber’s Tempe vehicles was involved in a high-speed collision, an event that was widely reported even though no one was seriously injured and the robot car was not at fault. And last week, an autonomous passenger shuttle in Las Vegas was involved in an accident on its first day of service; a truck had backed into the stationary shuttle and dented it slightly. Even so, news reports called it a crash.