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We absolutely, 100% have self driving cars that are accessible to consumers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Go6Syv8xNMA?si=esnCdfNdiVCH1OCv
https://youtube.com/watch?v=92aBMTpeQB8?si=sj4QHy8uDLDLLitW
Just not everywhere just yet. Maybe you can even say the technology isn't "mature," but it is absolutely here.
The Waymo in California thing is such a small experiment and the upside of fudging with it is so high that if it turned out in 5 years that actually it was mostly indians in a warehouse doing the driving I wouldn't even be surprised
We don't see any waymos driving on the sidewalk to dodge traffic jams, so we can disprove the Artificial Indian hypothesis.
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I can’t buy one. Waymo operates it select zones of select municipalities. It’s not accessible.
I presume you can't buy a Bugatti either. It's still an option that real living people can get for cash.
There's nothing standing in the way of Waymo rolling out an ever wider net. SF just happens to be an excellent place to start.
There’s quite a bit, it’s regulation, weather, geography, traffic levels, driver behaviour, crime.
I apologize for the hyperbole, and those are mostly valid considerations. I don't think traffic, driver behavior and crime matters, if they can work in SF at a profit. The other three are solvable or quasi-solved, regulation definitely is.
Isn’t SF one of the most tech-friendly cities in the nation? That’s where all the HQs are right?
Certainly. That is one of the drivers behind Waymo opening shop there. But even non rabid technophiles use their services, a car that drives itself and well is a service that almost anyone will pay for at a given price.
The demand is there, yes
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Yeah, it’s just that liability tolerance for SDCs is very low. That’s why Waymo cars drive extremely conservatively and they’ve been careful about expanding into routes where more aggressive driving is necessary, like airport pickup (although it’s coming). But it’s all going to happen pretty soon.
I recently saw a travelogue video by Noel Phillips in which he was picked up by a Waymo at PHX.
Yeah, we have them here in Phoenix, and as a native resident of Phoenix, I can say that we have some truly questionable human drivers on the road as it is.
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Self driving = ability to do 100% of what a competent human driver can do in any location, without geofencing.
By that standard, a good fraction of cars on the road don't qualify as human-driven.
(My idea for self-driving car laws: It has to pass a standard driver's license exam, and has to carry insurance. Anything past that is consumer protection instead of a valid safety concern.)
That would be a terrible law. Human driver's exams are made to filter out bad human drivers. The kinds of mistakes humans make are not the same as those made by AI. By virtue or being human, you can assume with high confidence that the examinee will not make whole classes of fatal errors, while you can not yet assume that of AI drivers.
They may be good enough now, it's just that the standard you propose is not a good filter.
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How about "has to perform no worse than the worst human with a valid driver's license (without geofencing, etc. etc.), and has to perform in a manner that would not result in the driver's license being taken away from the human"? That's a pretty charitable standard, I'd say, and we should probably aim for average, rather than worst).
The problem with that is that it's fairly easy to train an AI to pass an exam without it implying it can perform in general conditions. I think we already have LLM's that can pass a bar exam, for example.
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The geofencing is something I have some ambiguity on. Is it primarily legal/regulatory, or is it because Waymo requires extensive pre-data to function? I.e. if you dropped a Waymo on a Montana back road, would it be able to drive and navigate as well as a human driver in the same situation?
It seems like a bit of an unfair standard to hold it against Waymo capabilities if the issue is primarily legal/regulatory.
Sure, if they already have that capability and it’s only regulations holding them up then it is real self driving.
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