I think it would be a lot easier to develop full self-driving than to get Americans to accept and implement the road safety measures that are in place in Denmark. And that's not even counting if there are cultural factors that make Danes better drivers other things being equal. I can't even imagine how many billions of dollars it would take.
Cars won't save us from cars. Having widely available self driving car would save some lives but also set off another front in the culture wars and won't lead to significant changes in our infrastructure or how the burdens of mass driving are distributed.
The common point that you won't see huge structural improvements until human driven cars are gone is true and it's going to be a WHILE.
Even if you had perfect self driving technology the cultural and political capital you'd have to expend to get rid of recreational cars is just astronomical. At that point you may as well ban all of the fucking things, the electric ones aren't better they just shovel the suffering around a bit.
Just because L5 autonomy doesn’t solve every possible externality of driving, doesn’t mean it isn’t a watershed moment in human technological innovation and also massively life-saving and harm-reducing.
The externalities of driving are huge (both positive and negative) but the negative externality of driving accidents is nearly a trillion dollars per year in the US.
So it's easier for us to teach a computer to think than to teach people to think and act differently? Not sure if I agree with that statement, they require very different solutions, one is technical and the other social. I don't think just because the social solution is hard that it makes the technical one easier...
There is at least a glimmer of a suggestion that the technical solution will be workable. Waymo seems to be doing pretty well, and for all Tesla's fumbles, their autopilot seems to do better than humans on freeways in good conditions, which may someday save a nontrivial fraction of the lives lost in car accidents.
On the other hand, nobody has any idea how to get Americans to change their minds on guns, cars, or red meat, and there is no foreseeable course of action that would work. That's not to say it's impossible, but I don't see how to get from here to there. This isn't a case of people just not knowing that if they drove more carefully they'd be at less risk of dying. Public education is not even remotely sufficient to the task of accomplishing the behavior changes we're talking about. Hell, I bet you could spend a hundred billion dollars and not even get to the point of a solid majority agreeing there's a problem to be solved, much less make any progress on solving it.
Changing minds on guns, cars, and red meat is exactly as easy as setting up and constantly reinforcing the original (toxic) narratives around guns, cars, red meat, sugar, and the rest.
It isn't difficult or expensive in its own terms. You don't do it with "public education", you do by consistently dramatising the results you want in popular media, and demonising the results you don't.
Give it ten years of consistent messaging from multiple seemingly independent sources and it's done. Give it twenty five and it's so done the alternatives are no longer thinkable.
The difficult and expensive part comes from the enclosed nature of political power in the US, which has a choke point on the kinds of messages that are allowed to appear in popular media.
Cool, now you just need to convince popular media to include narratives about better road design and use in a way that is subtle enough to avoid pushback but obvious enough to have the intended shaping effect. This sounds both incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive, but you say it's not, and we have no way to test which one of us is right. Agree to disagree. :)
I think Americans are less of an outlier on that subject compared to other countries in the world. In fact, Denmark drinks more per capita than the US. But in any case it wasn't my goal to exhaustively list all the things Americans are stubborn about, just some examples that are ready to hand. ;)
Go look up changing to the metric system in the US. Failed effort billions of dollars. Definitely agree with the prior commentators statement. Technical solitarily already seems in the wild by enhancing driving capability...
Maybe not objectively, but probably for some people. While some could be, many expert engineers wouldn't be expert social scientists or public servants.
Agree. I expect 2050, easily, before there's even the remotest hope of even parity with human drivers.
I'm always astonished at how those most skilled at software, turn around and explain how software is better than humans at task $x. Yet, I've never used a piece of software without bugs. I've never seen a piece of software, not real world capable, which even remotely close to dealing with things, as well as humans.
And the more complex the software, the more bugs. Bugs abound in complex software. Full self driving is as complex as the linux kernel, easily.
How many bugs are in the Linux kernel? Right now?
To even hope, even begin to hope that things will be mostly bug free, bug free beyond human "bugs" when driving, we'd:
- Need to 100% freeze the platform, so the car has zero changes. Ever. Like a Volvo, 10+, 20+ years with only fixes for flaws.
No change in drive train. No change in how the car handles, etc.
- A 100% feature freeze fix for years and years, only bug fixes, no feature add.
It's just not happening overnight. And when it does, cars are going to require an addition of massive sensors, it's not going to be camera or radar, it's going to be camera, radar, lidar, motion, wind, and 50 other environmental sensors.
It's going to be mainine computing power in triplicate. Connectivity and sensors in triplicate. 100%, no way is the AI CPU even slightly network connected. No over-the-air updates.
Bugs cannot happen. Bugs kill. Bad hardware kills.
I do get that having a car self drive, in the desert, in constantly warm temp is an easy thing. Try it at -40C, in a snow storm, with a snow filled road, in the country with no ditches, no lines to see (due to snow), in the dark, when windy, periodic white-outs, and more.
Heck, I'll say there's a chance when AI can drive on a frozen lake. And yes, humans do and can.
So far, all AI driving is monoculture.
Not to mention, how about a 20 year old car? Or even 10? "Buy new?" Now you hate the environment! And 20 year old cars are driven daily by humans, no they aren't the primary cause of accidents, because, when driving you notice issues in the feel of how the car drives.
Can AI "feel" that? Sure! But that means loads and loads of sensors! And cost! ANd repair bills!
To be honest, my 2050 thing is likely mostly due to this. Cost.
