The experts had a clear view way back then, the CEOs just don’t want to listen.
IMO the truth is more with the experts. Each new location seems to require a lot of tuning to get right and function in a way the company is happy with. If a "self driving car" is one we can drop anywhere and have it drive we are still waiting on that.
Just like with IoT we'll eventually arrive at a boring, useful state...it will just take a while.
There is a universe of difference between something like ParkShuttle (its own right of way, using magnets in the road to detect position) and modern autonomous vehicles. Saying modern autonomous vehicles have environmental constraints is valid, saying that makes then no different than a "people mover on wheels" is not.
The point is that "deployed to a limited area" is not what people are thinking when they talk about a "self driving car." Of course ParkShuttle isn't the same as Waymo (or any other modern self-driving car) - but the question is how far we've come!
Are you claiming Waymo is ready to drive anywhere in the world? I do not think that's Waymo's position. So where are we? Cut through the rhetoric and tell it like it is - or join the rest of us who are speculating from the sidelines with incomplete information.
- even human drivers cannot safely operate in all locations/conditions
- all self-driving cars will need a mechanism for cops to talk to a human
Are you suggesting that Waymo is there? I don't think the evidence would support that. Even if we relax that goal a bit so the self-driving car can disengage and refuse to drive in, say, the most difficult 20% of situations, I don't think we can say Waymo is there, either.
One can quite reasonably point out that level 5 autonomy has not yet been achieved without moving the level 5 goalposts.
AI is a hard field to make predictions in.
Right but "hard to predict" does not mean "it will happen whenever I want it to happen". You can't look at a very hard problem, where a good sample of the world's experts say it will take more than 10 years to solve, and just say "I bet we can do it in 4 years" just because you want that to be true.
(The median expert prediction was between 2040-2060 previously, now quite a few people have moved that timeline to before 2035).
https://medium.com/@paul.k.pallaghy/chatgpt-did-any-one-remo...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k/forecastin...
With something this hard it's extremely tough to tell for sure when it will happen and often progress goes in chunks where it seems like it's going to happen but then doesnt.
Even CEOs who are an experts are by their very nature too biased to take at face value.
citation required
If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production.
The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.
Like a CEO saying, I have a material that can protect wearers from nuclear fusion blasts and it will be on the market in 6 months, but the experts in the field have yet to actually prove that material exists and create it in a lab.
But the point is that we are all equally capable of being wrong. Especially when we step outside our area of expertise. CEOs are just another type of expert but their domain is organization. We have to consider the source’s experience relative to the domain in question before we can decide if their prediction is trustworthy.
If I wanted to defend Musk I would do it explicitly. You don’t need to read between the lines.
Although one should never believe the ravings, useful work does surprisingly often nucleate around them, just not to the degree or with the speed promised.