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Comment by adoxyz | Hacker News Reader

And we have various versions and levels of drivereless cars today...

Do we? Where? The best version currently in existance could be (generously) described as an automated bus that only drives on a pre-mapped grid and still needs human supervision because you can't quite trust it yet. The most well known commercialy available "autopilot" (from Tesla) is so hilariously bad that I honestly don't understand how it's even legal to use, much less to sell for real money.

Even wide distribution of long-haul trucking exclusively on the interstate, or an automated bus-like commuter service (but actually good, unlike the regular bus), would be a pretty meaningful innovation, wouldn't it?

Of course, and it would be awesome, and I believe that sort of thing is actually possible within a relatively short timescale. General self driving like 90% of people do every day? Nope, don't see that.

Neither waymo nor cruise currently require human supervision. That's the whole point of this announcement: waymo is expanding their driverless program to SF.

Whether the grid is pre-mapped or not isn't particularly relevant. It's just how the technology works. The vehicles aren't driving on rails, they just have more semantic information about the world around them.

Waymo arguably reached level 4 with commercial taxis with no human at the wheel a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__EoOvVkEMo

We have various automated versions of lane assist, auto-braking, and parallel parking that mostly work.

Fortunately, we also have a developing world where we can pay humans $2/hour to mechanical-turk tele-operate our 'mostly-working' AI.

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