Ok would anyone like to do a long term bet with me? I bet that Carmack/Atwood's bet will be too ambiguous to resolve, and, neither wanting to look bad, they will both pay out to charity.
There are so many assumptions in this space that it's a fool's errand to try to list them.
I think the next paradigm shift will be in the cultural and regulatory perception, not in technology.
I have NO IDEA what that might mean, and I could be completely wrong! I accept that.
I think the technology has to demonstrate what it can do, and society has to come to terms with what the tech can do, and by doing those things we will painfully update our priors. Our existing prior beliefs will not be our new prior beliefs.
If I could make a $10,000 bet with John Carmack, I'd go the way Atwood has. No way there will be fully self-driving cars by 2030. That's only 8 years away. Fully self-driving cars need one of two things:
A) All cars are self-driving, and are networked, and centrally controlled. No exceptions.
B) The AI is smart enough that we should be worried about the ethical implications.
If an AI can react to terrible human drivers as well as a good human driver can, then I'd invite that AI over for dinner.
That's not sufficient - nowhere near sufficient. If an AI can react properly when kids are playing in a 5mph zone with cars parked on either side of the street, before their ball bounces into the street. If it can react appropriately to seeing a young kid clearly struggling to ride a bike. If it can understand that the tennisball bouncing across the road will be followed shortly by an enthusiastic dog... et cetera, et cetera.
I don't need an AI to compensate for shitty driving (taking a roundabout the wrong way). I need it to drive so as to protect non-vehicles that it encounters.
Basically, if you can find videos online of Waymo giving up and requesting backup for a situation not severe enough for humans to do the same, then you are not really at level 5 yet. If you cannot rely on the car to handle driving though any circumstance you could reasonably expect your hired chauffeur to handle, well then you are not level 5 yet. Examples of situations where humans give up are hurricanes, and blizzards.
And there are plenty of videos of it stopping for situations where no human would ever be equally confused, plus a good handful of videos of the cars doing absolutely unacceptable things resulting in near misses.
Are you really that confident that by 2030 Waymo's roadside assistance program will be disbanded, or at least reduced to a killswitch, summoning a replacement car and a tow truck (because obviously the car must be broken if assistance was called)? Because if they need more than that, it sure isn't level 5 yet.
IMO, minimum requirement for level 5 driving is merely to match human driver accident rates.
Minimum requirement for nerds, maybe. Minimum requirements for ordinary folks will probably be more along the lines of "will be noticeably better than me on average" and "will not make any given mistake more frequently (or more severely) than I would".
i.e. I expect people a lot of people would want "strictly better than me on practically every axis" as their minimum requirement, not just "on par with me based on the average accident rate". People just aren't going to put up with seeing cars make dumb mistakes that they would never make, even if the accident rate ends up being good on average.
The best driver aid systems I've seen are still just well-executed implementations of lane keep/change assist and radar cruise control- technologies that have been available in luxury cars for ~15 years. None of this stuff is actually new technology. It took decades to make existing driver aid technologies reliable and cheap enough to make them available to the average new car buyer. I have no reason to believe it will get easier from here.
I also have no reason to believe that the legal dilemmas behind autonomous driving features will go away. One of two things must happen- in fatal accidents caused by a car operating autonomously:
1. The driver (occupant?) will be liable. OR,
2. The manufacturer will be liable.
Option (1) is unprecedented, morally reprehensible, and would likely be overturned when some manufacturer eventually screws up on a Ford Pinto scale. Option (2) means that autonomous driving features will forever be hampered by the "keep your hands on the wheel!" warning bells that we already deal with today.
> 2. The manufacturer will be liable.
We already have big corporations that will risk huge liabilities for fatal vehicle accidents; they're called insurance companies.
So there's precedent for big corporations risking huge liabilities. Just instead of collecting an annual "insurance premium" they'll be collecting an annual "self-driving service subscription"
Link for curious: https://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-matteson/module-1-why-do...
I understand you to mean that there was not a dramatic result; I believe there were results - engineers and managers changed their goals to include more testing of components, IIHS and regulators also added testing. Automakers do respond to forced recalls. Reputational harm taken as seriously as direct fines and punishment.
But for sure count me with Carmack. My car is already driving me around my western suburban environment without trouble; zero-intervention drives are the rule now, not the exception. And it's been a long, long time since I've had to intervene for anything reasonably interpretable as a "safety" concern (mostly it's about stuff like navigation decisions, or the car is being a jerk at a merge and I don't want to be honked at, or it's being too slow pulling into an intersection and there's a lot of traffic, etc...).
Don't be fooled by the memery regarding Tesla. There are 60k+ FSD beta cars on the roads now, all of them with eager drivers wanting to post interesting failures to youtube. If these things were genuinely having trouble, we'd know.
It's not "done" for sure (in particular a lot of tuning needs to be done still), but it's at an effective level 3 already at least in my areas. And some work with remote recovery interfaces (something that Tesla doesn't seem to be focusing on) would get it to L4 in the kind of constrained environments Waymo and Cruise are operating in reasonably quickly, IMHO.
You are completely out of touch with reality if you think the people driving "FSD" beta are eagerly trying to show fault. It's precisely the opposite. You think those who get beta are randomly chosen?
>It's at an effective level 3 already at least in my areas.
That's a loooonnng way from an unattended drive across the country.
You own a car and, I bet, a financial stake in Tesla. Am I right?
Certainly not. We qualify with a safety score and wait for a new batch of cars to be added.
I genuinely don't understand the level of vitriol about this product. There are a lot of these cars out there. Given the demographics of this site, surely one of your friends has one already. Call them up and get a ride. See it for yourself.
I mean, everything looks terrible if you only watch greatest hits on youtube. There are literally whole subreddits dedicated to bad human driving, even. Yet... things work out. This is working far more than it's not, is all I'm saying. And the echo chamber effect has IMHO gotten a little out of control.
This isn't a hard technology to find for yourself. Go try it.
The product doesn't exist. It has not been delivered. Tesla has consistently lied about full-self driving.
Here are some lies about full-self driving hardware: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
Here are some further lies about full-self driving delivery: https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
I don't rely on anecdata when it comes to public safety and law. Where is the data from Tesla?
Hm, I see videos of pretty terrible FSD fails all the time - stuff like the car veering off into the other lane, trying to drive the pillars of bridges, failing to spot pedestrians and other fun things. It's quite impressive that the system is nearly there, but that I suspect this is the famous final 20% which is gonna be a monumental challenge to overcome
The self-driving AI marketers will tell you it's 99% of the way there!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...
I'm definitely in the Atwood boat.
It takes more than that. Just think, Uber's driver had lidar, safety driver, and still killed a woman. There's _a lot_ going on under the hood that separates the L4 from L2/L3 drivers.
One thing I think Tesla's missing is a repeatable evaluation framework for how their software performs (a.k.a what you need to convince yourself of the safety). As I understand it, they mostly test autonomous software by deploying it in ghost mode (current/future miles) instead of simulating on past miles. A lot of long tail problems (which is what's hard about autonomous driving) are only visible on the order of millions of miles. Some cases you may never encounter at a high enough rate, and you may need to build synthetic data or use other tricks to teach your driver how to act.
Consider construction zones: where are the lanes formed by the cones? Where should I enter, and where should cars come shooting out? Every construction zone is quite nuanced and contextual -- can you prove the autonomous driver can handle situations reasonably? I think Tesla's software isn't close to being able to crack those driving situations. I mean they make basic mistakes with traffic lights still (which are very challenging in and of themselves; how about those lights where there's an arrow? light that is out?)
If you lack infra to save difficult cases and no ability to generate synthetic situations and resimulate, it gets real dicey when you try to draw conclusions about the real-world performance. Their simulation capabilities are also limited by the fact that they only use cameras; depth estimation / object contours are not accurate enough to do the kinds of sims the Cruise and Waymo do.
Without good ground truth it's really hard to do proper safety evaluation. I suspect Tesla would either need a huge breakthrough in vision technology (maybe they can use something like this https://waymo.com/research/block-nerf) or at least map places their cars are driving so they can properly assess rates to give themselves, regulators, and customers confidence that they are safe for L4. Otherwise, their "good performance" will just be a product of survivorship bias, and bad performance will really hurt people (this is kind of happening now).
> The currently enabled features require a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.
https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-subscription...
So as for your offer, its a no thanks and no deal from me.
That said I wish there was a good site that allowed doing bets like this online, where you put the money in up front, and deputize a list of people to be judges to decide the winner. (yes it would typically be shorter term than 8 years, and obviously there would have to be rules for dealing with what happens if the judges aren't all available, incentives to reduce the chance of that happening, and so on)
I imagine anti-gambling laws make it difficult to do such things. But I can wish. It would reduce the number of people making poorly thought out assertions as to the future.