The dynamic by all these commentators has always seemed to be predicated on the idea that self driving vehicles somehow either need to be universally useful for all driving tasks or they will stay in the lab. In reality the way this stuff is going to roll out is incrementally. Due to the prevalence of on-demand driving services now, self driving vehicles can be deployed literally just-in-time for routes that are known to be safe under current conditions.

It's perfectly reasonable that once an existence proof is shown for one single commonly taken route in America to be handled autonomously (as it already has been) that that is all the foothold needed to start to deliver real economic benefits from the technology, and hence will align incentives for it to, eventually, be perfected.

Yeah, this. I've argued with lots of people about this, how self driving cars are never going to happen because solving all the problems is too hard.

And yet over the last years we've had improved cruise control, steering assist, emergency stopping, lane following. And now we're getting technology that can't drive in a lot of places but looks useful you a quick routine drive to a local shop on a quiet simple road for example.

It will gradually get more and more useful. One day you'll be thinking why don't we have driverless cars, only driver assist and then realize that you've not actually had to drive yourself for 2 years...

AI is the same. We'll not suddenly invent a general purpose AI like in the movies and books. Instead we'll slowly add features to the tools we have today one by one, until one day we realize that the accumulation of years of small enhancements has made something indistinguishable from AI

To be fair, there was a flurry of non-good news about autonomous cars about 2 or 3 months ago. Actual bad news, in the sense that things had been overhyped prior.

But hey, these things change fast. I have a Dreyfusian[0] prior on autonomous agents (some people think we're on the way to have robotic soccer referees) -- I'm skeptic about what currently passes for reinforcement learning, for one -- but I'm not above changing my mind. Suddenly even.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...

That sounds an incredibly risky strategy, are you commenting from direct knowledge or just taking a wild guess?

There's literally no such thing as "known to be safe" on a road, a crash could happen right in front of any of these cars, the car promptly kills its occupants through a mistake and then that's the end of self-driving cars for a decade.

Just commenting about the "one crash will kill the industry" part - I've heard this repeated many times over the last 20 years (way before self-driving cars were close to viable). I've repeated it myself.

But it looks like we're wrong. First of all, there have been crashes with even Tesla's autopilot, and it didn't seem to affect anything.

For another, this same logic would've probably meant that driving itself would never have become popular in the first place, or would've been set back many decades because of car crashes. That doesn't seem to have been the case.

I'm not saying these things can't kill an industry, but I think people are pretty tolerant of even unthinkable dangers beforehand, if the incentive is high enough.

To expand on your thought... I think "one crash will kill the industry" would have been true if this industry had continued to behave in a cowboy caution-to-the-wind (see early Tesla, Uber) fashion. But it really does seem like cooler heads have been prevailing. There's been (at least the appearance of) openness about various incidents, post-mortems, and plenty of lobbying of both the political and marketing varieties. I think this industry, for better or for worse, has made a nest for itself that will be able to absorb a good amount of setbacks, even of the mortal variety.

Well said.

Though possibly a bigger backlash could come when a self driving car kills someone in a situation where there are only 2 bad options to choose from. Being that with a human driver nothing was pre-planned people move on. But with a self driving car where such situations have to be decided in advance the backlash could be much more significant.

On the contrary this is an extremely risk-averse strategy since it allows the deployment of autonomous cars to be done in a way deliberately minimizes accident risk on a granular basis. In any deployment scenario of autonomous vehicles there are probabilities of crashes given the inputs to the system: the route, the weather, the behavior of other drivers, etc. When I said "known to be safe" I was using shorthand for "given an extensive array of inputs like route, vehicle condition, time of day, weather, known traffic patterns, prior trip logs, etc, does this route have a sufficiently low Bayesian prior of probability of failure to reach the destination safely to justify the use of an autonomous vehicle, and if so, which combination of system/configuration/etc minimizes the risk?"

Consider the alternative: autonomous cars theoretically get no production use and then suddenly go "on sale" for any buyer to use them in whatever route or condition they want. This would result in an extremely chaotic situation where suddenly there is no opportunity for gradual production deployment to slowly find the edges of their capabilities (which in some cases could result in accidents) -- instead the whole buyer-base of autonomous cars would be exposed to those edge cases, in full, from the moment the cars became available.

edit: Also I'm not sure what you are asking about direct knowledge: I'm stating observations of reality that self driving cars are already being rolled out incrementally in places/routes that they are best suited to.

No, I think it's the other way around.

People driving have accidents all the time right now that could have been avoided if proper automation was in charge.

At some point if you have an accident and kill someone, and it can be shown in court that if you'd been using the easily available technology that person would still be alive, people will start being prosecuted for gross negligence or worse.

By that logic, why aren't we already prosecuting drivers of older, less safe vehicles? Why don't we mandate that every single car on the road has a breaking system straight from a sports car(while you can still buy cars with drum brakes today).

Surely, if you only bought a more expensive vehicle, you could have saved a life! /s

Exactly and with ride sharing services is how it will happen incrementally.

Rodney Brooks, pioneering MIT robot scientist and founder of iRobot, came out this year with a variety of predictions. For what I'd call "real" self-driving cars, robot taxis that can handle what normal taxis do, he says not earlier than 2035: http://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

That's not shocking at all to me. There's a huge difference between "works well in carefully controlled demo conditions" and "works well enough to replace a mature product". A sunny day in Phoenix on a carefully controlled set of streets is very much the easiest difficulty level of driving.

> A sunny day in Phoenix on a carefully controlled set of streets

Not all days in Phoenix are sunny and 600 square miles is not "carefully controlled set of streets".

According to https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-dri...:

"Once Waymo is up and running in Arizona, it will gradually expand its service area to cover a 600-square mile swath around Phoenix"

By all signs that's going to happen this year.

I can't go by mysterious, unspecified "signs".

Not all days in Phoenix are sunny, but only 5% of days are rainy, and 0% are snowy. As compared with many midwestern cities, which get precipitation about a third of days. And all of which have snow, sleet, and ice to deal with much of the year.

The current program says: "We’re searching for early riders in parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert." So it's definitely not the 600 square miles you claim, and I've seen no evidence that riders can go absolutely anywhere even in the test area. And I note none of the video was at night.

Even the article you cite is clear that this is very limited, and that Waymo is intentionally avoiding disclosing a great deal, including where, when, who, and how much.

Yes, this is very cool. But Waymo, as it should have, has clearly picked the easy place to start. For a domain this complex, the 90/90 rule definitely applies.

17 years for 100% functionality in Boston and New York is not that long, really. It's soon enough for everyone from car manufacturers to city governments to be seriously considering their longer-term plans.

Definitely. And I think it's enough time for a lot of people to pass through the stages Douglas Adams described:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

It'll be very interesting to see where it goes. One of the discussions I've had with friends is the extent to which private ownership of cars goes from near-universal to niche. Reactions are all over the map, but my personal bet is that a lot of the kids who grow up with the idea of autonomous cars will never develop that very American attachment to personal car ownership.

Nice weather, nice roads. The conditions seemed pretty ideal. Couldn't tell from the video but it didn't look like they were on a road with a speed limit of anything faster than 45 MPH?

Plus, "viable" might not only have been referring to the tech itself. Public opinion and existing regulations, for better or worse, are a part of viability.

Probably somewhere in the middle. Arizona doesn't get a lot of weather and development is heavily skewed to be new (so the roads are at least more consistent and such).

As with many online debates, this one seems to be based on a difference in definitions. Some people take "self-driving cars" to mean "cars without a steering wheel that will drive my drunk butt around in the rain", or even "no more human cars on the road". I still honestly think that this will never happen without radical changes to our roads, cities, laws, and economy. Others view "self-driving cars" as an extension of cruise control that might eventually become fully automated. This can be already be seen in cars by Tesla, etc.

I think the "5+ years before it's viable" crowd is mostly responding to drum-beaters of the former, not the latter.

I think the answer is probably a little bit of both. Since this is a promotional video, it seems likely that this is in specific areas/times that were less complicated. I mean, take for example the self driving video Tesla made a few years ago [1] remove the legal need for someone in the diver seat, put some passengers in it while driving that specific route, cut it with some upbeat music, and you now have the Waymo video. On the other hand, if it's good enough for specific times and areas, that's still self-driving and still useful, even if not as useful as it could be.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...

We've had self-driving vehicles commercially available for decades now that work in certain locations. When someone says that it is more than 5 years away, they're talking about level 4+ cars that can operate everywhere and are actually for sale, not running a closed circuit trial. Five years still seems optimistic.

I guess waymo was just very conservative with their press releases, and people failed at reading between the lines.

Actually, Waymo (Google) is behind schedule. They said that we'd already have self-driving cars available to consumers now[1]. They're still running trials right now. There is no commercial service, either through the purchase of the vehicle or taxi-like services.

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/147940-google-self-drivi...

This is HN we are talking about, not the brightest crowd.

We're being shown a marketing video as part of a PR campaign at SXSW that says that everything works perfectly. Yeah, please forgive me if I am a bit skeptical.

This company is closely related to Google (who has, arguably, the brightest and smartest engineers working for it), a company who just recently knocked all of their own bigtables DBs offline for an hour by a "no-op config change".

Show me a third party using one of these cars for a year solid with no software maintenance, unexpected behavior, or human intervention, and I'll happily shut up. I'll even let them do that solely in AZ.