On a recent trip to San Francisco, I did what every visitor now does: summoned a car with no one in it. The Waymo arrived, and I climbed into the back seat, glancing instinctively at the empty driver's seat. The steering wheel turned itself, an unseen driver responsible for my safety.

I was there partly to spend time with Susan Winslow, CEO of Macmillan Learning. We are colleagues within the Holtzbrinck group, and we had come together for the most human of professional reasons: to collaborate. Comparing notes on our Waymo experiences, we agreed the rides were wonderful. As two self-confessed introverts, we had each found the driverless car to be a small oasis. No obligation to make conversation. A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts.

It took us slightly longer to name what we had lost. Two people who had crossed continents to talk to each other were quietly delighted by a technology whose central feature is that you don't have to talk to anyone.

Let me attempt a definition: the Waymo effect is what happens when a technology removes the friction of dealing with another human being, and we experience that removal as pure gain – because the costs of the friction were always visible to us, while its benefits were not. This is a familiar move for anyone who has read Tim Wu on "the tyranny of convenience." Albert Borgmann's related idea of the device paradigm goes a step further: a device delivers a commodity while concealing the practice that once had to be undertaken to earn it.

The costs of talking to a taxi driver are obvious: the small effort of politeness, the conversational roulette, the introvert's tax of sustained small talk at 7am. The benefits are diffuse and deferred: the driver was, for many of us on many days, the last stranger we were obliged to encounter. The last person from outside our bubble – professionally, politically, socially – with whom we had an unchosen conversation.

Neither Susan nor I would design a world without those conversations. We simply enjoyed opting out of this one. And that, of course, is how such things are lost: never by decision, always by convenience. One comfortable ride at a time.

I should be clear that this is not an anti-Waymo article (the rides really were excellent, and I would take one again without hesitation – that is rather the point). It is an article about research. Because the same logic that removed the driver from the car is now, with equal serenity and considerably greater consequence, removing the collaborator from the research process.