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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

Your objection to him claiming a win on self driving is that you think that we can still define cars as self driving even when humans are operating them? Ok I disagree. If humans are operating them then they simply are not self driving by any sensible definition.

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Human interventions are some non zero number in current self driving cars and will likely be that way for a while. Does this mean self driving is a scam and in fact it is just a human driving, and that these are actually ADAS. Maybe in some pedantic sense, you are right but then your definition is not useful, since it lumps cruise control/ lane-keeping ADAS and Waymo’s in the same category. Waymo is genuinely, qualitatively a big improvement above any ADAS/ self driving system that we have seen. I suspect Rodney did not predict even Waymo’s to be possible, but gave himself enough leeway so that he can pedantically argue that Waymo’s are just ADAS and that his prediction was right.

No one said scam (although in the case of Tesla it absolutely is). It's just not a solved problem yet.

> It's just not a solved problem yet.

Human driving isn't a solved problem either; the difference is that when a human driver needs intervention it just crashes.

This is not about crashes. By all accounts, the Waymo cars are mostly fully self driving, I beleive even the article author agrees with that. This includes crash avoidance, to the extent that they can.

The remote operation seems to be more about navigational issues and reading the road conditions. Things like accidentally looping, or not knowing how to proceed with an unexpected obstacle. Things that don't really happen to human drivers, even the greenest of new drivers.

Ok, but crashes are much worse than navigational issues or accidentally looping. It’s only status quo bias that makes us think driving is more solved if you get the accidental looping fixed before the crashing.

Only true up to some extent. If a car can't get you anywhere, then crashing is almost irrelevant: you won't use it, because there's nothing to be gained from that. A car looping around in a parking lot is extremely safe, but completely useless.

Irrelevant.

Some of them are scams, yes. For stuff like Waymo, it definitely doesn’t match the hype at the time he made the original predictions. As pointed out above, there were people in 2016 claiming we’d be buying cars without steering wheels that could go between any two points connected by roads by now.

Yeah, I think semi-autonomous vehicles are a huge milestone and should be celebrated but the jump from semi-autonomous to fully-autonomous will, I think, feel noticeably different. It will be a moment future generations have trouble imagining a world where drunk or tired driving was ever even an issue.

The future is here, just unevenly distributed. There are already people that don't have that issue, thanks to technology. That technology might be Waymo and not driving in the first place, or the technology might be smartphones and the Internet, which enables Uber/Lyft to operate. Some of them might use older technologies like concrete which enables people to live more densely and not have to drive to get to the nearest liquor establishment.

You can make exactly the opposite argument as well: You think that we can still define cars as human-driven even when they have self-driving features (e.g. lane keeping). If the car is self-driving in even the smallest way, then they simply are not human-operated by any sensible definition.

No one is making predictions or selling stock in the amount of “fully human controlled” vehicles.

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