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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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On the other hand, it might work like self-driving cars: the technology improves and improves, but getting to the point where it's as good as a human just isn't possible, and it stalls at some point becase it's reached its limits. I expected that to happen for self-driving cars and wasn't disappointed, and it's likely to happen for ChatGPT too.

Self driving cars are already better than humans, see Waymo's accident rates compared to humans: https://x.com/Waymo/status/1869784660772839595

The hurdles to widespread adoption at this point, at least within urban cities is all regulatory inertia rather than anything else

They have a lower accident rate for the things that they are able to do.

Yes, and they are able to drive within urban cities and for urban city driving have a lower accident rate per mile driven than humans who are also urban city driving.

As far as I know that’s exclusively for particular cities in North America with wide roads, grid layouts, few pedestrians and clement weather. Which presumably therefore also means that they are likely to face sudden problems when any of those conditions change. I personally know of an experimental model spazzing out because it saw a pedestrian holding an umbrella.

All of which is before considering cost. There just isn’t enough benefit for most people to want to change regulation.

At the very least, saying self-driving cars are better than human needs some pretty stringent clarification.

San Francisco has plenty of narrow streets and pedestrians. Various parts of the service areas have streets that are not on a grid. There's obviously no snow in San Francisco, but the waymos seem to work fine in the rain.

I personally know of an experimental model spazzing out because it saw a pedestrian holding an umbrella.

A waymo model?

Ah, no, much smaller company and dead now. Not saying Waymo does this, just that unexpected oh-shit moments do happen the moment you get out of your comfort zone.

Perhaps waymo's biggest strength so far has been an extremely cautious and slow rollout which I suspect allows them to detect issues like this before they cause accidents (on the theory that for every accident there are ten near misses).

Self-driving cars are getting better and better though!

Asymptotically.