Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

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The Waymo criticisms are absurd to the point of dishonesty. He criticizes a Waymo for... not pulling out fast enough around a truck, or for human criminals vandalizing them? Oh no, once some Waymos did a weird thing where they honked for a while! And a couple times they got stuck over a few million miles! This is an amazingly lame waste of space, and the fact that he does his best to only talk about Tesla instead of Waymo emphasizes how weak his arguments are, particularly in comparison to his earliest predictions. (Obviously only the best self-driving car matters to whether self-driving cars have been created.)

"Nothing ever happens"... until it does, and it seems Brooks's prediction roundups can now be conveniently replaced with a little rock on it with "nothing in AI ever works" written on it without anything of value being lost.

It’s interesting that in my reading of the post I felt like he hardly talked about Tesla at all.

He calls out that Tesla FSD has been “next year” for 11 years, but then the vast majority of the self-driving car section is about Cruise and Waymo. He also minorly mentions Tesla’s promise of a robotaxi service and how it is unlikely to be materially different than Cruise/Waymo. The amount of space allocated to each made sense as I read it.

For the meat of the issue: I can regularly drive places without someone else intervening. If someone else had to intervene in my driving 1/100 miles, even 1/1000 miles, most would probably say I shouldn’t have a license.

Yes, getting stuck behind a parked car or similar scenario is a critical flaw. It seems simple and non-important because it is not dangerous, but it means the drive would not be completed without a human. If I couldn’t drive to work because there was a parked car on my home street, again, people would question whether I should be on the road, and I’d probably be fired.

Interesting, that wasn't my takeaway from the article at all!

Direct quote from the article:

> Then I will weave them together to explain how it is still pretty much business as usual, and I mean that in a good way, with steady progress on both the science and engineering of AI.

There are some extremely emotional defences of Waymo on this comment thread. I don't quite understand why? Are they somehow inviolable to constructive criticism in the SV crowd?

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