You press a button, take your hands off the wheel, and it drives down the highway.
That is absolutely self driving.
If half of your driving time is done by the car, that is still a massive benefit to consumers.
End to end autonomity, Is even better, of course, but I think that everyone is selling short the in between 95% self driving.
Even TINY features, like autobraking in emergencies, has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives every year, if it got fully deployed in all cars.
And for jobs, highway driving is 90% of what truck drivers do. If you have highway self driving (which we DO, right now!), then there goes most truck driver jobs.
I agre with you part way. Of course it is still a massive benefit.
But fully autonomous driving is still transformative in entirely different ways that makes it hard to treat the evolutionary steps as all that exciting even though many of them probably should be.
Could you ELI5 what the massive benefit is? The system requires you to be alert and focused on the road the entire time.
We know for a fact e.g. from the aviation industry that having a human sitting alert but doing nothing increases human response time and decreases the correctness rate of their actions, which is one reason why airplanes don't regularly land on autopilot, even though the tech has been there for a long time. In fact, auto-land on airliners is only used in very low visibility, low wind conditions, or for training to ensure pilots use it at least semi-annually.
The huge benefit of autopilot on airplanes and ships is that for normal operation out on the ocean or up in the sky, it's sufficiently safe that the pilot/captain can focus his attention elsewhere for long periods of time.
No it doesn't. Systems like Otto, do level 4, self driving for trucks on highways. These are on the roads right now.
The truck drivers can just get up out of their seat and do something else. There goes 90% of truck jobs, as now you only need a driver for the first and last parts of a trip.
Other benefits: saved lives. The more highway driver cars we have, the less that humans will be driving, and the less chance that a human will make a mistake.
The level 2 and 3 stuff on a Tesla, is already a better driver than most humans.
Statistically, the error bar is so large that your statement, and the one you're replying to, are not accurate. We don't know because there's too little data.
Yes, I agree, to a point. However, if we suppose that Autopilot driving was several orders of magnitude safer than normal driving, the probability that the (admittedly poor) statistics at this point would show it being equal to normal driving is very low.
If I say "black swans are extremely rare in this part of the world", and you spot one the very next day, the Bayesian in you would assign a low probability to my statement being true, even though that's based on a sample size of one.
Drives down the highway, and it it decides there's something it doesn't understand, it stops driving. Which is not the same thing as "stops the vehicle" - in some cases it's actually a "f*ck it, I'm out, now you drive the car yourself".
Anything fits within "autonomous except when not autonomous" - even the crudest cruise control.
