Self driving cars are a hard problem, a very hard problem. So is CAPTCHA and machines are still not that great at solving them.

The problem space of autonomus vehicles is a large one, and even with how many mistakes human drivers make, I still don't think we're anywhere near the tech to make safe autonomous driving vehicles. We're at a minimum, 15 years off.

I want you to think about all the technology we use every day. Our phones, desktops, laptops, are full of bugs. Hell I found bugs in the ticketing system I buy metro cards from the other day. We see display kiosk crash all the time.

A Tesla car with lane assistance (please stop calling it auto-pilot) recently drove a car into barrier. Another kept driving for hours without hands on the wheel (fixed in an update. Was that driver passed out? No way to know.)

Now you might say, this is different. The engineers working on self-driving tech are at the level of the ones that build bridges, or make pacemaker software (which by the way, some were found to have a bluetooth vulnerability recently) or plane avionics.

Maybe, but Uber certainly isn't. They're a culture of scum shit shop. This isn't a small thing here. It's a huge, huge problem space that no one completely understands yet. Why are there not any self-driving cars on the streets of NYC or Chicago? Because it's difficult, and dangerous and if there were, people would be dead right now.

For all the money we're investing in self driving cars, we could build tech that already works. Singapore and London both have fully autonomous trains; some that arrive at 30 second intervals and carry millions of people a day. America needs to get its normal infrastructure back before we go down this fantasy world of self driving cars.

I wrote more about this a while back:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...