> Instead, the consensus has become that we’re at least 10 years away from self-driving cars.
I'm going to assume the founder of a self-driving truck company knows what he's talking about.
But at the same time, I have a hard time reconciling that with the fact that I sat in a car that drove itself all around San Francisco, dealing with a ton of edge cases.
Maybe we won't get to a 100% drive-anywhere-you-want-car in 10 years, but to be fair, a lot of humans aren't capable of driving a car anywhere either.
There are a lot of LA drivers who can't drive in snow, for example. I was one of them, until I got practice, and even then, I'm not that safe at it.
I think as long as we set the bar at "drive anywhere a car can go with 100% safety" we will never reach that bar.
But if the bar is at "drive as well as a human in most of the places humans drive", well, I've already seen a car that can do that.
What's hard about this comparison is knowing exactly what you saw. If the safety driver disengaged 1-3x, it might have felt like a robotaxi drove you all over; but the effort to get that system safe for unmanned regular service might take another decade.
If it was super mapped and following a fixed route with object avoidance; the difference between a car that can go on an HD-map track and one that can go point-to-point in a city is also maybe a decade.
We humans have limited empathy for what is really really really hard for computers. Many know that's true for an app, but somehow ignore that knowledge when it comes to autonomy.
I'm going to assume the founder of a self-driving truck company knows what he's talking about.
But at the same time, I have a hard time reconciling that with the fact that I sat in a car that drove itself all around San Francisco, dealing with a ton of edge cases.
Maybe we won't get to a 100% drive-anywhere-you-want-car in 10 years, but to be fair, a lot of humans aren't capable of driving a car anywhere either.
There are a lot of LA drivers who can't drive in snow, for example. I was one of them, until I got practice, and even then, I'm not that safe at it.
I think as long as we set the bar at "drive anywhere a car can go with 100% safety" we will never reach that bar.
But if the bar is at "drive as well as a human in most of the places humans drive", well, I've already seen a car that can do that.