Are these only working on very specific types of streets and traffic volumes or was everyone wrong and the tech accelerated very fast?
It's perfectly reasonable that once an existence proof is shown for one single commonly taken route in America to be handled autonomously (as it already has been) that that is all the foothold needed to start to deliver real economic benefits from the technology, and hence will align incentives for it to, eventually, be perfected.
And yet over the last years we've had improved cruise control, steering assist, emergency stopping, lane following. And now we're getting technology that can't drive in a lot of places but looks useful you a quick routine drive to a local shop on a quiet simple road for example.
It will gradually get more and more useful. One day you'll be thinking why don't we have driverless cars, only driver assist and then realize that you've not actually had to drive yourself for 2 years...
AI is the same. We'll not suddenly invent a general purpose AI like in the movies and books. Instead we'll slowly add features to the tools we have today one by one, until one day we realize that the accumulation of years of small enhancements has made something indistinguishable from AI
But hey, these things change fast. I have a Dreyfusian[0] prior on autonomous agents (some people think we're on the way to have robotic soccer referees) -- I'm skeptic about what currently passes for reinforcement learning, for one -- but I'm not above changing my mind. Suddenly even.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...
There's literally no such thing as "known to be safe" on a road, a crash could happen right in front of any of these cars, the car promptly kills its occupants through a mistake and then that's the end of self-driving cars for a decade.
But it looks like we're wrong. First of all, there have been crashes with even Tesla's autopilot, and it didn't seem to affect anything.
For another, this same logic would've probably meant that driving itself would never have become popular in the first place, or would've been set back many decades because of car crashes. That doesn't seem to have been the case.
I'm not saying these things can't kill an industry, but I think people are pretty tolerant of even unthinkable dangers beforehand, if the incentive is high enough.
Though possibly a bigger backlash could come when a self driving car kills someone in a situation where there are only 2 bad options to choose from. Being that with a human driver nothing was pre-planned people move on. But with a self driving car where such situations have to be decided in advance the backlash could be much more significant.
Consider the alternative: autonomous cars theoretically get no production use and then suddenly go "on sale" for any buyer to use them in whatever route or condition they want. This would result in an extremely chaotic situation where suddenly there is no opportunity for gradual production deployment to slowly find the edges of their capabilities (which in some cases could result in accidents) -- instead the whole buyer-base of autonomous cars would be exposed to those edge cases, in full, from the moment the cars became available.
edit: Also I'm not sure what you are asking about direct knowledge: I'm stating observations of reality that self driving cars are already being rolled out incrementally in places/routes that they are best suited to.
People driving have accidents all the time right now that could have been avoided if proper automation was in charge.
At some point if you have an accident and kill someone, and it can be shown in court that if you'd been using the easily available technology that person would still be alive, people will start being prosecuted for gross negligence or worse.
Surely, if you only bought a more expensive vehicle, you could have saved a life! /s
That's not shocking at all to me. There's a huge difference between "works well in carefully controlled demo conditions" and "works well enough to replace a mature product". A sunny day in Phoenix on a carefully controlled set of streets is very much the easiest difficulty level of driving.
Not all days in Phoenix are sunny and 600 square miles is not "carefully controlled set of streets".
According to https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-dri...:
"Once Waymo is up and running in Arizona, it will gradually expand its service area to cover a 600-square mile swath around Phoenix"
By all signs that's going to happen this year.
Not all days in Phoenix are sunny, but only 5% of days are rainy, and 0% are snowy. As compared with many midwestern cities, which get precipitation about a third of days. And all of which have snow, sleet, and ice to deal with much of the year.
The current program says: "We’re searching for early riders in parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert." So it's definitely not the 600 square miles you claim, and I've seen no evidence that riders can go absolutely anywhere even in the test area. And I note none of the video was at night.
Even the article you cite is clear that this is very limited, and that Waymo is intentionally avoiding disclosing a great deal, including where, when, who, and how much.
Yes, this is very cool. But Waymo, as it should have, has clearly picked the easy place to start. For a domain this complex, the 90/90 rule definitely applies.
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
It'll be very interesting to see where it goes. One of the discussions I've had with friends is the extent to which private ownership of cars goes from near-universal to niche. Reactions are all over the map, but my personal bet is that a lot of the kids who grow up with the idea of autonomous cars will never develop that very American attachment to personal car ownership.
Plus, "viable" might not only have been referring to the tech itself. Public opinion and existing regulations, for better or worse, are a part of viability.
I think the "5+ years before it's viable" crowd is mostly responding to drum-beaters of the former, not the latter.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/147940-google-self-drivi...
This company is closely related to Google (who has, arguably, the brightest and smartest engineers working for it), a company who just recently knocked all of their own bigtables DBs offline for an hour by a "no-op config change".
Show me a third party using one of these cars for a year solid with no software maintenance, unexpected behavior, or human intervention, and I'll happily shut up. I'll even let them do that solely in AZ.