$100B and 10 Yrs of Development Later and Self-Driving Cars Can Barely Turn Left
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
OK, so "we" have spent 10 years and $100B on this and it doesn't "fully" work yet. So what? Who said how long it was going to take or how much it was going to cost? This amounts to the little kid in the car screaming "are we there yet? Are we there yet?" The answer is "no", but we are going to get there eventually. That's pretty damn close to inevitable, barring nuclear armageddon or something.
So yeah, I'm a skeptic in terms of believing I won't be riding in a fully autonomous self-driving car in the next 10 years. Or maybe 20 years. But 50 years out? 100? 200? 1000? I mean, yeah, it's absolutely going to happen.
Remember the old saw "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the short term and underestimate the change that will occur in the long term. People overestimate what can be done in one year, and underestimate what can be done in ten."[1]
I was astounded by the latest Tesla FSD release shown off by YouTubers. I had no idea it was starting to perform so naturally.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHadhx3c840
Earlier videos of the system were downright scary, but now it almost looks like a human is driving.
Imagine if someone said “$100 billion and ten years later and all we have is biplanes” or “$100 billion and ten years later and we don’t even have Internet yet, we just have plain old microcomputers” and assumed that progress would just be stopped right then and there, because that’s what this article is really getting at.