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At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that th

• sofixa 3y ago
  The problem is that, unlike with LLMs where a human always can and should fact check/reword before using, there is no such option with self driving. People's lives are literally directly at stake if things go wrong. For limited scenarios such as geofenced to a city with good weather, it seems that self driving cars (at least Waymo's tech) is good enough, baring some small lapses which are more funny than dangerous. As a general thing everywhere? To me it doesn't look like we're even close (like 10 years) to being there. Also, the problems actually instead of supposedly being solved by self-driving are... very minimal. There will be no noticeable improvement in things that matter the most on the global scale (pollution, congestion, time spent), only marginal practical and maybe financial improvements (there might be more and cheaper taxis). Self-driving electric trains are already a solved problem that could solve probably the majority of transportation needs, congestion and pollution all in one go.
  • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    Cheap taxis could lead to people abandoning car ownership and this a huge reconfiguration of American cities. (if they end up cheaper than self owned cars)
    • sofixa 3y ago
      If everyone still takes the taxi everywhere, what would be the reconfiguration about and where would it come from? Everyone will be still stuck in traffic due to the physical impossibility of fitting everyone in an individual vehicle on the roads at the same time.
      • mrshadowgoose 3y ago
        This is false. It's been shown through computer modeling that road congestion emerges as a function of both vehicles/road segment/time unit and human driving behavior. Remove the humans from the driver's seat, and your effective road capacity goes up significantly without doing anything else.
        • sofixa 3y ago
          Do you have links to those computer models? Do they take into account induced demand? And still, even if autonomous cars are drastically more efficient, with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient (even the biggest highways will have a fraction of the capacity of a proper metro).
          • mrshadowgoose 3y ago
            > Do you have links to those computer models? You're more than capable of doing this research yourself. > with a passenger per car the space use is still drastically less efficient Sorry, this simply isn't the metric for success. It might be your metric, but it certainly isn't the population's metric. A lot of people want to travel comfortably in cars, "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned. Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles will allow us to eventually eliminate most congestion, and you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere.
            • sofixa 3y ago
              How would they eliminate congestion when they're so space inefficient? Even if they're more efficient at traffic flow, there's only so much physical capacity on the roads that people want to travel on. > you're just going to have to accept that cars aren't going anywhere. Cars aren't going anywhere, but they're the wrong solution for a variety of reasons (congestion leading to time loss, pollution (including noise pollution), land use efficiency or lack thereof, etc.) for a very big part of transportation needs. > A lot of people want to travel comfortably in car And a lot don't and aren't given that option. > "mindless pursuit of space efficiency" be damned. Mindless? There's only so much physical space available in the places where people live and work. American cities are often comprised of massive parking lots taking up valuable space that can be put to much better use, simply because most people are forced to commute by car. Give them another option and many (of course not all) would prefer it, which would also make driving much more pleasant for the remaining drivers.
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
      People in America mostly view cars as a status symbol and a part of their identity, which is why everyone buys giant trucks and SUVs. Why would a better taxi change that? Only "the poors" use taxis
      • HDThoreaun 3y ago
        This is not as true in cities, where almost no one has a giant truck and there are not so many SUVs.
  • ketzo 3y ago
    I mean, Waymo is doing hundreds of regular trips throughout all of San Francisco. I think the technology is getting pretty good.
• mrshadowgoose 3y ago
  That's not actually a blocking problem, as you have the same issues with human drivers today. At the end of the day, just like literally everything else in life, self-driving tech is a statistical process with corresponding costs. The bar for success here isn't perfection. Rather, it's whether or not self-driving vehicles are cheaper than human-driven vehicles. Part of the cost of a self-driving vehicle hinges on how often the vehicles end up in failure states necessitating remote human intervention and/or insurance payouts. It's fine if they sometimes fail, they just have to do so infrequently enough to be cheaper. And if Waymo is to be trusted, they already appear to be safer.
• zild3d 3y ago
  > the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't Partnering with Uber let's them offer self driving only within pretty well known constraints. Weather, locality, traffic, routes, time, etc.
• cloudwalking 3y ago
  This is actually not true at all. At Waymo we have a very good understanding of our behavior.