> It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars
Wait... Self driving cars actually happened. Seems like the hype was true, but 5 years later than expected and now people just think it's normal so they feel the hype was overblown.
Wait... Self driving cars actually happened. Seems like the hype was true, but 5 years later than expected and now people just think it's normal so they feel the hype was overblown.
None of this is even close to happening. Waymo is impressive tech, for sure, but what they're proving is that this is just not currently solvable as a general problem. The best we can do is to meticulously craft a solution for one constrained use case - driving in SF, driving in LA, etc. And even then, we need to pick certain use cases - it's not like they could use their current tech to start autonomous service in Juneau Alaska. Or even NYC, most likely.
I'll believe self-driving is solved when I can order an automated ride to a BLM/forest service dirt road I only have GPS coordinates for and that has cell service on the hilltop only.
Might as well move it to "as long as there's no semi crossing the road" to cover for Tesla.
Centrally-managed clean and rigid setting is not the full extent of the problem domain.
As I said, I'll believe it's solved when these limitations are no longer necessary for it to work. You can choose to believe it based on a research project or marketing materials.
I've always been a proponent that we would see self driving cars in our lifetime. But they have absolutely not arrived outside of the sheltered enclaves of a handful of tech-centered cities.
In my opinion, it's as similarly off-base as to making claims that 'mach speed consumer air travel' "arrived" just because for a few decades you could catch a Concorde flight between NYC and London.
You’re right that they have a long way to go before being fully mainstream. But thousands of people are using them every day in multiple major cities. That’s a pretty big milestone.
Not able to handle what the streets of Los Angeles throw at it, however.
For most people, they'll consider self-driving as "happened" when most cars are self-driving. Similarly, the consider the smartphone as "happened" not when the palm came out - but somewhere around the iPhone 4.
Like, right now, immunotherapy for cancer has "happened" - there's real patients really doing it, for real. But most cancer patients don't consider immunotherapy as "happened", they're still getting chemo. Once chemo is obsolesced, we can consider immunotherapy as "happened". From then, to now, may be on the scale of decades.