Lt. Saul Jaeger, who commands the traffic unit at the Mountain View Police Department, remembers the first time a few years ago when he was given a demo of Waymo’s self-driving cars.

Jaeger was not only interested from a professional point of view, but also as a citizen. After all, he lives in Mountain View near one of the Waymo facilities. He watched in awe as the engineers showed him the autonomous vehicle’s (AV) own view. This screen reduces everything to line drawings and other simplified sensory inputs.

“It’s incredible,” he told Ars. “It felt like The Matrix, when they flip the switch—it’s seeing everything, it’s seeing way more than you or I can—and it’s making decisions.”