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There's no way. I'm basically trailer trash, so take this with salt and tequila, but Level 5 is gonna be a 95% problem. You can get to 95% by spending gobs of

There's no way. I'm basically trailer trash, so take this with salt and tequila, but Level 5 is gonna be a 95% problem. You can get to 95% by spending gobs of money, but to get the other 5%, you're going to need exponentially more money PER PERCENT. And nobody is going to want to invest that much.

nebula8804 5y ago
I am not so sure. Think of the potential value to be unlocked: It will radically change the way real estate is planned. If cars drive themselves, you can switch over to a "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners. Why would you need to waste space on parking lots, single garages etc. You also unlock the ability for more people to live further away from work. It has the potential to extract a massive amount of value out of other parts of the chain as well. Aside from software(which in my opinion is just stealing existing value from everyone else) pretty much everything else is minuscule growth. What is the next leap in maintaining growth of the economy? Extract the value out of these blue collar jobs(trucking, taxi driving, other logistics). Combine this with the rise of simpler designs in EVs + less car ownership you also can bring in mechanics and repair into your value chain and extract that value as well.
- mikestew 5y ago
  You just outlined the advantages to be had should such come about. But am I missing the part where you explain why you think this has any chance of coming to fruition? Because that's what parent is on about. I mean, if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops. But no one is explaining how frog wing technology has taken (if you'll pardon the pun) some big leaps the past few years.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    The potential returns motivate the investment needed to achieve them.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners I don't see that. Cars are not just transport. They are fashion statements. They are virtue signaling. They are portable storage lockers. I just don't see everyone who owns a car now giving all that up just because the car can drive itself. The traffic/congestion implications of "car on demand" are also staggering, basically doubling the number of trips made as each car delivers itself empty to the next customer. And further reducing the cost of car ownership will only pull more people away from mass transportation/biking/walking.
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    > They are fashion statements. They are virtue signaling. They are portable storage lockers. Flip it around the other way - if you had a L5 car at your fingertips, would you give it up so that you could make a fashion statement, virtue signal, or have a portable storage locker?
    - notahacker 5y ago
      There's already apps which give us the equivalent of a L5 car fleet at our fingertips; they just come with low-paid humans attached. Not all car drivers' total cost of car ownership works out less than the Uber fares for the rides they take either....
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      Yes. Instantly. I keep all sorts of stuff in my car, from shopping bags to a trauma kit. When i am on alert (military) i keep a duffle bag full of my stuff so i dont have to go home before a snap exercise. And in a town of pickup trucks and suvs i enjoy being the smallest car on the road, especially when i see trucks in the ditch needing help. Ever seen a 2door honda pull an f150 out of the ditch? I have. I got a picture of that one in my office.
  - bin_bash 5y ago
    There is so much wrong with your statement. First, Gen Z doesn’t care nearly as much as previous generations about driving and what vehicles mean for status. Expect that trend to continue especially when ownership goes away. And as far as “doubling trips”, the car won’t have to drive far to find its next pickup and it may not have to do empty pickups at all with the equivalent of Lyft Line. If we don’t need parking lots and spaces we can use that real estate for more mass transit.
- bobajeff 5y ago
  It would be way cheaper and more practical to just to have everyone work from home that can or live close by to where they work or have cities invest in better public transport and biking infrastructure. Sure none of those are as cool as the JohnnyCab but they already exist so require no R&D.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    Sure. All it would take is razing LA to the ground and rebuilding it from scratch. I don't think I'm exaggerating, either. In a city plan like that one, any public transit route is going to, even at optimal configuration, have simultaneously too many stops and too little: * Too many stops, because the train or bus spends more time stopped than it spends moving, so rides across the city take forever. * Too few stops, because you still have to walk a mile to actually get where you're going. Fixing this requires a walkable city, which can be summarized as "don't spend half the land area on parking and stroads."
- manmal 5y ago
  These upsides wouldn’t benefit car manufacturers though, since they won’t profit from zoning policy changes.
- x0x0 5y ago
  Nobody is unclear on the value. Lots of people -- including me -- don't believe that it's possible without significant technological advances that look to be extraordinarily expensive. ie open R&D problems. I will say that if anyone can do this, it will be Waymo/Google. Unlike Tesla, it's not a fraud. That said, it's notable they're doing this in Arizona. Limited rain, no snow, clear weather all the time.
- paulmd 5y ago
  > I am not so sure. Think of the potential value to be unlocked: It will radically change the way real estate is planned. If cars drive themselves, you can switch over to a "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners. Why would you need to waste space on parking lots, single garages etc. You also unlock the ability for more people to live further away from work. none of that value accrues to the people who make self-driving cars though (or their investors). It's not like if waymo gets rid of your car for you, they get your parking spot or garage. It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society.
  - twofornone 5y ago
    Like any service that provides value to individuals, people will pay the makers of self driving cars for the convenience.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    Maybe I didn't word it properly. I discussed the value gained as well as how the advent of self driving will transform existing stores of value like parking spaces. In this case: the value is captured by the car rental company (which will likely be the car manufacturers themselves). Part of the value comes from the rent that the parking space would have extracted. >It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society. Its hard to predict how much value they can gain unless we have more information but I'd imagine if the majority of cars become on demand, then there has to be at least a few billions of dollars in potential value. In regards to if people will actually take up rental: Since everyone else is moving to a rental model today(streaming services vs owning, cell phone "refresh" contracts, potential apple offering a monthly subscription that always gets you a new phone, car companies offering all included monthly car subscription) by the time this thing rolls out it is plausible that there will be high uptake on a rental model.
- rakejake 5y ago
  If software is "stealing existing value from everyone", then what does that make self-driving software?
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    That was the whole point of my response. I am not saying every piece of software steals value from everyone, I am saying software in general steals value from everyone else. So in your example, self driving software steals value from real estate, taxi drivers, truckers, other logistics services. By making them redundant their margin is now owned by the software makers that made them redundant in the first place. This is what is driving the valuation of all these FAANG companies. They are just vacuuming up all the existing value from the rest of the country/world.
    - rakejake 5y ago
      Sure, but that is more of "reassignment of ownership of capital" and that makes it less likely and not more likely that such an endeavor will be funded (for political reasons). Unlike say nuclear fusion (safe and practically unlimited energy at an order of magnitude previously unseen is worth the spend and most countries would bite I think), is self-driving worth hundreds of billions in expenditure? I don't know.
      - nebula8804 5y ago
        >Sure, but that is more of "reassignment of ownership of capital" ha ha your phrasing is funny. It is more like "sudden unexpected reassignment of ownership of capital". >and that makes it less likely and not more likely that such an endeavor will be funded (for political reasons). Yes the powers that be are finally starting to slowly turn against the software people. You see Europe getting tired of them losing every last bit of the little value chain they have left. Meanwhile in the US, elites are getting tired of software empowering people other than themselves and are starting to make moves to try and put the genie back in the bottle. We saw all these tech CEOs being brought up in congress but all that it showed is that they still don't fully get how they have been robbed yet, just that they know that they have been robbed. If they manage to stop the software industry (a big doubt) yes I can see them putting a stop to self driving tech(although China seems determined to steam ahead no matter what). If they do manage to stop self driving that means they have also managed to kill a lot of the software industry as well and with that one of the last few paths to a solid comfortable middle/upper middle class life in this world. >Unlike say nuclear fusion (safe and practically unlimited energy at an order of magnitude previously unseen is worth the spend and most countries would bite I think), is self-driving worth hundreds of billions in expenditure? Now you are pulling an exact number out of thin air. Will it really be hundreds of billions in cost? When you talk about "hundreds of billions" you are talking about a noticeable chunk of the US's GDP and the complete GDP of most countries. Since when has software or even advanced AI research ever cost that much to develop? Don't get me wrong: I believe it will be in the billions or even tens of billions over many years, but this is a cost that that can be absorbed by the companies/government entities that are pursuing this and even tens of billions can be justified by the potential gains.
- allturtles 5y ago
  I see lots of self-driving car advocates talk about this "on-demand car" model, but I don't see any way it works in practice. No actual sharing: At rush hour, I and most of the people around me will need a car to get to/from work. Therefore the rental fleet will have to be large enough to meet this peak demand, and effectively there will have to be a car in the fleet allocated to me (to get me to and from work). So (amortized over time) I will have to compensate the company for the cost of the car, plus the cost of bringing it to me every day, plus overhead, plus profit. Reduced convenience: A car may not be available immediately when I need/want it. I have to either risk not having a car for some important event or plan in advance and book what I need. The car I'm allocated on any given day may be too small to meet my needs. I have to wait for the car to arrive, can't store my stuff in it, have to take time to install/uninstall car seats, get charged a fee if I leave my empty soda can in it. IMO, for a regular car user (i.e. someone who currently uses a car for multiple trips per day) moving to an on-demand model will be at least as expensive as and less convenient than owning a car. There might be exceptions in very dense urban environments where parking is very expensive, but those places usually have a good public transit alternative.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    > effectively there will have to be a car in the fleet allocated to me I think most people will carpool to work in self driving vans. It'll be so much cheaper than having your own car.
    - allturtles 5y ago
      They could carpool to work now in their non-self driving cars. So why don't they do it? What does self-driving change?
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        It's hard to coordinate and doesn't save money since you still need your own car to do errands. Pre covid many people absolutely were using uber pool to carpool to work.
mikestew 5y ago
Trailer trash or not, sometimes it takes the kid to point out the nudity of the emperor. This hick from Indiana would take Atwood's side of the bet against any that care to pony up the money for the other side. The only thing about this that surprises me is that this post isn't from, like, five years ago. But Carmack took this bet within the past week? I just don't think we have the evidence to suggest this is realistic, and plenty to suggest that it's a long way off. We do seem to have the evidence that if it happens, it probably won't be Tesla doing it. EDIT: ah, perhaps Carmack knows better and is simply willing to write off $10K for the lulz (from the TFA): I'd like to thank John for suggesting this friendly wager as a fun way to generate STEM publicity.
- md2020 5y ago
  We don’t at all have evidence that Tesla can’t do Level 5 within the timeframe of this bet. Tesla is the farthest along of anyone who’s trying self-driving. Waymo and Cruise are geofenced, and still don’t work much better than Tesla. Aside from those, Comma.ai is doing seriously impressive stuff (sneaking up on Tesla tbh) on a way, way smaller budget, with less hardware, and notably, they’re going for a vision-only stack this year. Judging by what Comma’s been able to accomplish with basically smartphone hardware (maybe one step up from that), I’d be shocked if Carmack loses this.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - geohot 5y ago
    President of comma.ai here. I'd bet against L5 by 2030.
    - georgewsinger 5y ago
      Might be misremembering, but IIRC you predicted L5 by 2030 on one of your earlier livestreams? Or was that L3/L4? Did you change your mind?
sharken 5y ago
I'm with you on that argument and believe that Jeff will walk away as the winner of the bet. Looking at a busy street makes me almost certain, that true self driving cars will be too expensive to develop. However, if we accept random deaths caused by autonomous vehicles, there is a chance. But everyone wants guarantees that cannot be given.
kobalsky 5y ago
why does everyone think this is a pipe dream when waymo has been already offering driverless rides? they were sae level 4 already IIRC. the key part of the bet is the "in major cities". you may have complications on some road without much data, but major cities will be tested to the inch multiple times by then. of course waymo has huge sensors but 8 years to shrink those doesn't seem impossible.
- kajecounterhack 5y ago
  Companies like Waymo and Cruise are both working on making L4 scalable to multiple geos and it's going to take a ton of time and money. But L5 is another beast altogether.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  Waymo still has humans watching remotely and ready to take control, right?
  - kajecounterhack 5y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/why-hasnt-waymo-expanded-its-driverless-service-heres-my-theory/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/why-hasnt-waymo-expande... > Waymo has a staff of fleet operators that oversees the cars and provides guidance—such as confirming that the car has chosen a safe route through a construction zone (Waymo says that its remote operators never drive the cars directly).
- babelfish 5y ago
  L4 in Phoenix in the wintertime is much, much easier than L4 in Seattle (or Minnesota, or New York)
  - kobalsky 5y ago
    yeah I reckon they started on the easiest place to implement. but it's still impressive seeing the thing driving around a shopping mall parking lot with pedestrian traffic, they put a lot of trust in this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBJ0GvsQeak&t=3820s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBJ0GvsQeak&t=3820s
jjoonathan 5y ago
> to get the other 5%, you're going to need exponentially more money Yeah, but you're going to be making exponentially more money in the markets you have already entered. Investors will be able to do the math rather than envision dreams. If the math adds up, they will be willing to deploy a truly staggering amount of capital to secure the growth.
- bombcar 5y ago
  I don't think the growth is unlimited; there's got to be an upper bound of "value" even if it's literally "cost of a chauffeur for every single car on the road today".
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Yes, but that's like saying the sky is the limit. Also, we are presuming that this will always be a one-sided affair, and that self-driving cars will always have to adapt to roads and not vice versa. I'm almost certain that once self driving cars become a thing somewhere, they will be so desired by everyone else that people will become willing to clean up messy infrastructure elsewhere that would otherwise preclude their deployment.
deleted 5y ago
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sroussey 5y ago
The 95% way there (Tesla) is orders of magnitude easier than the 99% (Cruise). And, as experienced in similar issues with uptime guarantees, the costs are quite different. But so is the technology used! You don’t just scale-up a single MySQL server for all of Twitter.
dm319 5y ago
How long have we had commercially available voice recognition for? And why does it still not work ~25% of the time? I'm with codinghorror on this, there's so much interpretation that needs to be done of other drivers that I don't see how this will work.
charcircuit 5y ago
If you can sell the car at 95% codinghorrer wins the bet. It's only gated by the ability to buy a car. You could even implement a remote driver where a human drives your car using the internet and that would fulfill the conditions of the bet.
agumonkey 5y ago
I'm betting for a push on L5, failure, then an attempt at digitizing public space so L5 becomes easy.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Ditto, but I think that failure will be regional, and that this will push the fervor. Neighboring regions have L5 but we don't? Suddenly we have a monumental impetus for change.
- lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  > ... digitizing public space so L5 becomes easy. I feel this is what should be happening, but our economy and our culture prefer Lone Ranger style innovation.
anamax 5y ago
What does 100% mean? I ask because I think that there are useful points short of "never makes a mistake." The alternative to self-driving cars isn't perfection. It is humans, humans who not only vary in their peak performance, but in their context-specific performance. A car that drove better than me when I'm tired is a good thing for everyone. There's lot of talk about liability, but it seems both wrong and incomplete. One incompleteness comes up with an "accident" happens that a less-than-perfect self-driving system would have avoided. The legal system might not be willing to penalize in that situation now, but the upcoming Breathalyzer mandate is moving us that direction. One wrong focuses on "will the author of the self-driving system be held liable?" I think that the liability will go to the driver/owner, as today. If it's better than me and my insurance company is willing to insure me, then why wouldn't my insurance company be willing to insure my use of a self-driving system?

nebula8804 5y ago

I am not so sure. Think of the potential value to be unlocked: It will radically change the way real estate is planned. If cars drive themselves, you can switch over to a "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners. Why would you need to waste space on parking lots, single garages etc. You also unlock the ability for more people to live further away from work. It has the potential to extract a massive amount of value out of other parts of the chain as well. Aside from software(which in my opinion is just stealing existing value from everyone else) pretty much everything else is minuscule growth. What is the next leap in maintaining growth of the economy? Extract the value out of these blue collar jobs(trucking, taxi driving, other logistics). Combine this with the rise of simpler designs in EVs + less car ownership you also can bring in mechanics and repair into your value chain and extract that value as well.

mikestew 5y ago
You just outlined the advantages to be had should such come about. But am I missing the part where you explain why you think this has any chance of coming to fruition? Because that's what parent is on about. I mean, if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops. But no one is explaining how frog wing technology has taken (if you'll pardon the pun) some big leaps the past few years.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  The potential returns motivate the investment needed to achieve them.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners I don't see that. Cars are not just transport. They are fashion statements. They are virtue signaling. They are portable storage lockers. I just don't see everyone who owns a car now giving all that up just because the car can drive itself. The traffic/congestion implications of "car on demand" are also staggering, basically doubling the number of trips made as each car delivers itself empty to the next customer. And further reducing the cost of car ownership will only pull more people away from mass transportation/biking/walking.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  > They are fashion statements. They are virtue signaling. They are portable storage lockers. Flip it around the other way - if you had a L5 car at your fingertips, would you give it up so that you could make a fashion statement, virtue signal, or have a portable storage locker?
  - notahacker 5y ago
    There's already apps which give us the equivalent of a L5 car fleet at our fingertips; they just come with low-paid humans attached. Not all car drivers' total cost of car ownership works out less than the Uber fares for the rides they take either....
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Yes. Instantly. I keep all sorts of stuff in my car, from shopping bags to a trauma kit. When i am on alert (military) i keep a duffle bag full of my stuff so i dont have to go home before a snap exercise. And in a town of pickup trucks and suvs i enjoy being the smallest car on the road, especially when i see trucks in the ditch needing help. Ever seen a 2door honda pull an f150 out of the ditch? I have. I got a picture of that one in my office.
- bin_bash 5y ago
  There is so much wrong with your statement. First, Gen Z doesn’t care nearly as much as previous generations about driving and what vehicles mean for status. Expect that trend to continue especially when ownership goes away. And as far as “doubling trips”, the car won’t have to drive far to find its next pickup and it may not have to do empty pickups at all with the equivalent of Lyft Line. If we don’t need parking lots and spaces we can use that real estate for more mass transit.
bobajeff 5y ago
It would be way cheaper and more practical to just to have everyone work from home that can or live close by to where they work or have cities invest in better public transport and biking infrastructure. Sure none of those are as cool as the JohnnyCab but they already exist so require no R&D.
- notriddle 5y ago
  Sure. All it would take is razing LA to the ground and rebuilding it from scratch. I don't think I'm exaggerating, either. In a city plan like that one, any public transit route is going to, even at optimal configuration, have simultaneously too many stops and too little: * Too many stops, because the train or bus spends more time stopped than it spends moving, so rides across the city take forever. * Too few stops, because you still have to walk a mile to actually get where you're going. Fixing this requires a walkable city, which can be summarized as "don't spend half the land area on parking and stroads."
manmal 5y ago
These upsides wouldn’t benefit car manufacturers though, since they won’t profit from zoning policy changes.
x0x0 5y ago
Nobody is unclear on the value. Lots of people -- including me -- don't believe that it's possible without significant technological advances that look to be extraordinarily expensive. ie open R&D problems. I will say that if anyone can do this, it will be Waymo/Google. Unlike Tesla, it's not a fraud. That said, it's notable they're doing this in Arizona. Limited rain, no snow, clear weather all the time.
paulmd 5y ago
> I am not so sure. Think of the potential value to be unlocked: It will radically change the way real estate is planned. If cars drive themselves, you can switch over to a "Car on demand" model for most current vehicle owners. Why would you need to waste space on parking lots, single garages etc. You also unlock the ability for more people to live further away from work. none of that value accrues to the people who make self-driving cars though (or their investors). It's not like if waymo gets rid of your car for you, they get your parking spot or garage. It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society.
- twofornone 5y ago
  Like any service that provides value to individuals, people will pay the makers of self driving cars for the convenience.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  Maybe I didn't word it properly. I discussed the value gained as well as how the advent of self driving will transform existing stores of value like parking spaces. In this case: the value is captured by the car rental company (which will likely be the car manufacturers themselves). Part of the value comes from the rent that the parking space would have extracted. >It's a huge social benefit but investors are looking for return-on-investment, not making a multibillion loss to improve society. Its hard to predict how much value they can gain unless we have more information but I'd imagine if the majority of cars become on demand, then there has to be at least a few billions of dollars in potential value. In regards to if people will actually take up rental: Since everyone else is moving to a rental model today(streaming services vs owning, cell phone "refresh" contracts, potential apple offering a monthly subscription that always gets you a new phone, car companies offering all included monthly car subscription) by the time this thing rolls out it is plausible that there will be high uptake on a rental model.
rakejake 5y ago
If software is "stealing existing value from everyone", then what does that make self-driving software?
- nebula8804 5y ago
  That was the whole point of my response. I am not saying every piece of software steals value from everyone, I am saying software in general steals value from everyone else. So in your example, self driving software steals value from real estate, taxi drivers, truckers, other logistics services. By making them redundant their margin is now owned by the software makers that made them redundant in the first place. This is what is driving the valuation of all these FAANG companies. They are just vacuuming up all the existing value from the rest of the country/world.
  - rakejake 5y ago
    Sure, but that is more of "reassignment of ownership of capital" and that makes it less likely and not more likely that such an endeavor will be funded (for political reasons). Unlike say nuclear fusion (safe and practically unlimited energy at an order of magnitude previously unseen is worth the spend and most countries would bite I think), is self-driving worth hundreds of billions in expenditure? I don't know.
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      >Sure, but that is more of "reassignment of ownership of capital" ha ha your phrasing is funny. It is more like "sudden unexpected reassignment of ownership of capital". >and that makes it less likely and not more likely that such an endeavor will be funded (for political reasons). Yes the powers that be are finally starting to slowly turn against the software people. You see Europe getting tired of them losing every last bit of the little value chain they have left. Meanwhile in the US, elites are getting tired of software empowering people other than themselves and are starting to make moves to try and put the genie back in the bottle. We saw all these tech CEOs being brought up in congress but all that it showed is that they still don't fully get how they have been robbed yet, just that they know that they have been robbed. If they manage to stop the software industry (a big doubt) yes I can see them putting a stop to self driving tech(although China seems determined to steam ahead no matter what). If they do manage to stop self driving that means they have also managed to kill a lot of the software industry as well and with that one of the last few paths to a solid comfortable middle/upper middle class life in this world. >Unlike say nuclear fusion (safe and practically unlimited energy at an order of magnitude previously unseen is worth the spend and most countries would bite I think), is self-driving worth hundreds of billions in expenditure? Now you are pulling an exact number out of thin air. Will it really be hundreds of billions in cost? When you talk about "hundreds of billions" you are talking about a noticeable chunk of the US's GDP and the complete GDP of most countries. Since when has software or even advanced AI research ever cost that much to develop? Don't get me wrong: I believe it will be in the billions or even tens of billions over many years, but this is a cost that that can be absorbed by the companies/government entities that are pursuing this and even tens of billions can be justified by the potential gains.
allturtles 5y ago
I see lots of self-driving car advocates talk about this "on-demand car" model, but I don't see any way it works in practice. No actual sharing: At rush hour, I and most of the people around me will need a car to get to/from work. Therefore the rental fleet will have to be large enough to meet this peak demand, and effectively there will have to be a car in the fleet allocated to me (to get me to and from work). So (amortized over time) I will have to compensate the company for the cost of the car, plus the cost of bringing it to me every day, plus overhead, plus profit. Reduced convenience: A car may not be available immediately when I need/want it. I have to either risk not having a car for some important event or plan in advance and book what I need. The car I'm allocated on any given day may be too small to meet my needs. I have to wait for the car to arrive, can't store my stuff in it, have to take time to install/uninstall car seats, get charged a fee if I leave my empty soda can in it. IMO, for a regular car user (i.e. someone who currently uses a car for multiple trips per day) moving to an on-demand model will be at least as expensive as and less convenient than owning a car. There might be exceptions in very dense urban environments where parking is very expensive, but those places usually have a good public transit alternative.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  > effectively there will have to be a car in the fleet allocated to me I think most people will carpool to work in self driving vans. It'll be so much cheaper than having your own car.
  - allturtles 5y ago
    They could carpool to work now in their non-self driving cars. So why don't they do it? What does self-driving change?
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      It's hard to coordinate and doesn't save money since you still need your own car to do errands. Pre covid many people absolutely were using uber pool to carpool to work.

mikestew 5y ago

Trailer trash or not, sometimes it takes the kid to point out the nudity of the emperor. This hick from Indiana would take Atwood's side of the bet against any that care to pony up the money for the other side. The only thing about this that surprises me is that this post isn't from, like, five years ago. But Carmack took this bet within the past week? I just don't think we have the evidence to suggest this is realistic, and plenty to suggest that it's a long way off. We do seem to have the evidence that if it happens, it probably won't be Tesla doing it. EDIT: ah, perhaps Carmack knows better and is simply willing to write off $10K for the lulz (from the TFA): I'd like to thank John for suggesting this friendly wager as a fun way to generate STEM publicity.

md2020 5y ago
We don’t at all have evidence that Tesla can’t do Level 5 within the timeframe of this bet. Tesla is the farthest along of anyone who’s trying self-driving. Waymo and Cruise are geofenced, and still don’t work much better than Tesla. Aside from those, Comma.ai is doing seriously impressive stuff (sneaking up on Tesla tbh) on a way, way smaller budget, with less hardware, and notably, they’re going for a vision-only stack this year. Judging by what Comma’s been able to accomplish with basically smartphone hardware (maybe one step up from that), I’d be shocked if Carmack loses this.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- geohot 5y ago
  President of comma.ai here. I'd bet against L5 by 2030.
  - georgewsinger 5y ago
    Might be misremembering, but IIRC you predicted L5 by 2030 on one of your earlier livestreams? Or was that L3/L4? Did you change your mind?

sharken 5y ago

I'm with you on that argument and believe that Jeff will walk away as the winner of the bet. Looking at a busy street makes me almost certain, that true self driving cars will be too expensive to develop. However, if we accept random deaths caused by autonomous vehicles, there is a chance. But everyone wants guarantees that cannot be given.

kobalsky 5y ago

why does everyone think this is a pipe dream when waymo has been already offering driverless rides? they were sae level 4 already IIRC. the key part of the bet is the "in major cities". you may have complications on some road without much data, but major cities will be tested to the inch multiple times by then. of course waymo has huge sensors but 8 years to shrink those doesn't seem impossible.

kajecounterhack 5y ago
Companies like Waymo and Cruise are both working on making L4 scalable to multiple geos and it's going to take a ton of time and money. But L5 is another beast altogether.
gameswithgo 5y ago
Waymo still has humans watching remotely and ready to take control, right?
- kajecounterhack 5y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/why-hasnt-waymo-expanded-its-driverless-service-heres-my-theory/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/why-hasnt-waymo-expande... > Waymo has a staff of fleet operators that oversees the cars and provides guidance—such as confirming that the car has chosen a safe route through a construction zone (Waymo says that its remote operators never drive the cars directly).
babelfish 5y ago
L4 in Phoenix in the wintertime is much, much easier than L4 in Seattle (or Minnesota, or New York)
- kobalsky 5y ago
  yeah I reckon they started on the easiest place to implement. but it's still impressive seeing the thing driving around a shopping mall parking lot with pedestrian traffic, they put a lot of trust in this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBJ0GvsQeak&t=3820s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBJ0GvsQeak&t=3820s

jjoonathan 5y ago

> to get the other 5%, you're going to need exponentially more money Yeah, but you're going to be making exponentially more money in the markets you have already entered. Investors will be able to do the math rather than envision dreams. If the math adds up, they will be willing to deploy a truly staggering amount of capital to secure the growth.

bombcar 5y ago
I don't think the growth is unlimited; there's got to be an upper bound of "value" even if it's literally "cost of a chauffeur for every single car on the road today".
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Yes, but that's like saying the sky is the limit. Also, we are presuming that this will always be a one-sided affair, and that self-driving cars will always have to adapt to roads and not vice versa. I'm almost certain that once self driving cars become a thing somewhere, they will be so desired by everyone else that people will become willing to clean up messy infrastructure elsewhere that would otherwise preclude their deployment.

deleted 5y ago

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sroussey 5y ago

The 95% way there (Tesla) is orders of magnitude easier than the 99% (Cruise). And, as experienced in similar issues with uptime guarantees, the costs are quite different. But so is the technology used! You don’t just scale-up a single MySQL server for all of Twitter.

dm319 5y ago

How long have we had commercially available voice recognition for? And why does it still not work ~25% of the time? I'm with codinghorror on this, there's so much interpretation that needs to be done of other drivers that I don't see how this will work.

charcircuit 5y ago

If you can sell the car at 95% codinghorrer wins the bet. It's only gated by the ability to buy a car. You could even implement a remote driver where a human drives your car using the internet and that would fulfill the conditions of the bet.

agumonkey 5y ago

I'm betting for a push on L5, failure, then an attempt at digitizing public space so L5 becomes easy.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Ditto, but I think that failure will be regional, and that this will push the fervor. Neighboring regions have L5 but we don't? Suddenly we have a monumental impetus for change.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
> ... digitizing public space so L5 becomes easy. I feel this is what should be happening, but our economy and our culture prefer Lone Ranger style innovation.

anamax 5y ago

What does 100% mean? I ask because I think that there are useful points short of "never makes a mistake." The alternative to self-driving cars isn't perfection. It is humans, humans who not only vary in their peak performance, but in their context-specific performance. A car that drove better than me when I'm tired is a good thing for everyone. There's lot of talk about liability, but it seems both wrong and incomplete. One incompleteness comes up with an "accident" happens that a less-than-perfect self-driving system would have avoided. The legal system might not be willing to penalize in that situation now, but the upcoming Breathalyzer mandate is moving us that direction. One wrong focuses on "will the author of the self-driving system be held liable?" I think that the liability will go to the driver/owner, as today. If it's better than me and my insurance company is willing to insure me, then why wouldn't my insurance company be willing to insure my use of a self-driving system?