We don't even have "full autonomous" trains, planes, or trucks yet.
Unfortunately, it seems many people are not going to accept auto-cars with less than airplane like safety levels. Of course that will never happen. So yes, "full autonomous" vehicles are a long way off (probably forever), unless someone (Waymo?, Tesla?) can show they are much safer and some kind of national or state level laws are passed to restrict the legal liability of the makers and owners of such vechiles. Sort of like how ski resorts would not exist without special laws restricting liablity.
[Quick edit: a good question here though is what kind of drivers test is sufficient for us to even begin considering autonomous vehicles? Is that even answered?]
We don't want approximately the same kind of performance, we want much better performance, so it essentially must be different from the human driver
This is incredibly generous assumption, especially given the fact that cars with advertised Autopilot features, like Tesla's offerings, actually make accidents more likely[1][2]. Compared to the driver fatality rate in other luxury vehicles, Tesla's offerings nearly triple driver fatality[3].
This is like theorizing about a car that survives 99.9% of all impacts at any speed. It doesn't exist, nor is there any indication that it will exist, and it doesn't serve a purpose other than to prop up a contrived argument.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/in-2017-the-feds-said-t...
[2] https://driving.ca/tesla/model-s/auto-news/news/iihs-study-s...
[3] https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...
> So does that mean that Autosteer actually makes crashes 59 percent more likely? Probably not.
now THIS is a strawman
At level 5, one expects a self-driving car to ride gravel roads, park in highly temporary parking spots, spot police officers and follow their orders, drive short distances on non-roads (e.g. to drive around a car pile-up), etc.
A car that recognizes those cases, stops, and tells it’s passenger “please help me out for a few meters” would be a fantastic accomplishment and very, very successful, but wouldn’t qualify as level 5 autonomous.
Rocket science is a matter of applied physics, with materials science thrown in, and a bit of very well understood and straightforward software engineering.
Autonomous driving is a matter of getting AI models functioning to a well enough degree. My understanding of how this is done is you try to find more and better data to throw at it and tweak the models to hopefully make it learn better until the point it seems to pass your tests, which are whatever you've been able to come up with that you can think to test.
It's like trying to throw a pitch over home plate, but in one case you have a pitching machine you can aim and dial in the speed, and in the other you have a living pitcher. Only that living pitcher is an Orangutan you're trying to train.
One of those is a lot more art than science, and as such, getting well understood and reproducible outcomes that don't fall apart at a fundamental level when you add one more variable is harder.
If Tesla’s cars were as good in parking as that, one in six attempts to park a car would lead to a fender-bender or worse.
Yes, that isn’t a valid comparison, but it does show that we accept way higher failure rates for rockets than we do for cars (aside: that also is the reason I don’t see space tourism become popular soon. If, say, the 20th or 30th millionaire who books a flight dies, the market will dry up rapidly)
Edit: one way to realize this is true is if you consider that the rocket already IS fully self driving. Everything after 1 minute mark before the liftoff is fully controlled by onboard computers, people are only there to push the big red autodestruct button if anything goes wrong.
Anyway, my point was something else. That something might seem impossible, and then after just 5 years it can be considered mundane. And I think that's what we will see with self driving too. Unless oil industry manages to manipulate public opinion in a way that stops Tesla before that.
Some people think of it as being able to drive anywhere at any time in any condition. This is unlikely to ever happen before AGI. What matters in Tesla's case is more likely being able to drive in some small number of places in specific circumstances without a physical driver in the vehicle (but possibly a remote one to handle unusual circumstances).
Now I don't think Tesla is going to even get to that in 3 years, but it wouldn't surprise me to see Waymo there.
Airport parking/shuttle service. They could even augment the AI by using markers in the roadways. That's about as autonomous as we're going to get in the next decade.
How could that ever work? The "unusual circumstances" that matter will usually require either action in less than a second, like an improvised detour sign, or situational awareness, like a human directing traffic around some random obstacle. At best, Google will be making cars that pull over to the shoulder and call for help in a few years.
Ya, that's pretty much what I was getting at.
Please try to avoid using double or more negates. It’s a bit hard to read.
And don't doubt that Elon/Tesla use this to their fullest advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...