How is it not obvious that FSD most likely requires artificial general intelligence and is, thus, probably somewhere between "many decades away" and "humans will never achieve it"?
If you're accustomed to horses and see someone selling cars, it'd be reasonable to say, "Those are ridiculous. There are numerous places only my horses can reach. There will virtually never be a time cars fully replace horses." And you'd be right. It's still true--there are places horses can reach that cars cannot. But because of the value of cars, society has reoriented itself such that reaching those places doesn't matter to the vest majority of us.
I think self-driving cars will be the same. We don't need them to operate in every single road / circumstance ever. There may always be roads that self-driving cars can't drive on. But it'll become irrelevant because the vast majority of places people want to go will become navigable by self-driving cars, whether through the cars getting better or the roads becoming more easily navigable.
OTOH, if it means that the vehicle is liable to have a 25-second "blackout" in the middle of your morning commute roughly once a month, it seems very different.
40,000 traffic accident deaths per year in the US.
< 400,000,000 drivers.
So more than 1 fatality per year per 10,000 drivers. There's a 99.99% change that you won't kill someone while driving in a given year.
That's just fatalities.
> In 2017, there were an estimated 2,775,608 police-reported motor vehicle crashes in which at least one passenger vehicle (i.e., a passenger car or a light truck) was towed from the crash scene in the United States, which resulted in an estimated 1,686,240 known passen-ger vehicle occupant injuries.[0]
So 0.6% per driver per year.
So far today I've seen one driver going the wrong way down a one-way road, and one run a red light. (Plenty entering the intersection on yellow and leaving on red, but at least one where it was blatant). I was on the road for maybe thirty minutes.
Do you think the average driver spends less than five minutes per year driving unsafely?
[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
These writers, being tech writers and not AI experts, didn't understand the subject very well and basicaly just repeated the industry's claims without really understanding the state of the art.
Then people reading those articles who also were not AI experts and didn't have much of a technical background anwyay (except being interested in cars) got taken in, thiking that if the press says that self-driving cars are just around the corner, then they must be just around the corner.
Why did software folks in particular got taken in? Because most people who write software don't write AI software and even many who use it don't understand it. Computer people are used to thinking of computers like magical dream machines, so the common reaction to overinflated claims about AI in general is wonder before surprise and cheering before skepticism.
Did high accuracy OCR without AGI seem possible before it was developed?
It was always known that pattern matching would be what ML algorithms would be great at - since the 60s or do. Reasoning about and "understanding" things - well, not so much. Some people hoped that this behavior would at some point just "emerge". But they basically resorted to this because they did not see any promising path to these goals.
- People with a vested interest in FSD being RSN playing a game of topper with each other, investors, and the market
- Extremely rapid progress in supervised learning, especially vision, being extrapolated into thinking along the lines of "How much longer can getting to FSD really take if we've made this much progress in just a few years?"
- A bunch of young urbanites with dreams of never having to buy a car or even learn to drive bought into all the hybe because they so wanted to believe. (And no small part of the backlash is probably that many of the same group feel basically kicked in the teeth at this point as reality sets in.)
I don't see why self-driving vehicles can't be dependant on additional self-driving-vehicle-related-signage or sensors embedded in / around / near roads, etc etc.
Humans are fairly dependant on additional signage, maps, and navigation tools (Google / Apple Maps).
If we can accomplish such a shift, there are already much more worthy ends to put the money and political will towards: increased public transportation, rebuilding of streets to safely support non-vehicle traffic, public ev infrastructure, etc. Spending massive amounts to subsidize the few rich who could afford autonomous cars would just be further regressive policy.
Because it doesn't. The issue is that all the self-driving car companies ignore how people actually drive.
People memorize their local driving area--it's why teenagers are so incredibly dangerous and why if you put a new stop sign into an area you cause chaos for several months. A self-driving car needs to do the same--the advantage is that a self-driving car can download that "memorization" for any new area it goes into.
Between memorized zones, people mostly "keep station"--they get onto a freeway and keep a relative position with respect to the lanes and the other cars on the road until they get back off.
When something goes very wrong, people panic and random chance takes over the fate of the vast majority of people.
None of this represents general or artificial intelligence. However, solving these tasks requires a lot of very grubby, non-scalable work over a lot of grubby data.
Collision Damage Waivers and the fact that they are relatively expensive suggests the opposite.
Accidents near an airport are more than 50% of auto accidents I have had totally in my life. All of the airport accidents I was literally not moving when someone drove into me.
We vastly overestimate the competence of the average driver.
Self-driving car companies have been memorizing ("mapping") areas for years.
Waymo car fully self driving three days ago:
Now this felt like a student driver, overly busy with correctness, insensitive to the actual experience.
I think these cars should be marked, like student drivers, to signal their inevitable difference in behavior.