I agree that ultimately they need a significant amount of local training data. But I believe they would be better off having a human drive a car around to map things out, run their 'AI' on the results, and then manually review/correct lower confidence results. Or, better yet, make a database and have cities provide feeds of changes/permits/closures.
"Sorry, I know you crashed, your car's on fire, and you're bleeding out. But I need to get this road closure form submitted before I can help, or a self driving car might ignore the stationary accident and make things worse. Ugh, 5G's not working today... hold on..."
The cars must be able to handle random, unexpected events happening without maps, and without external guidance. A wheel falls off a truck in front of you for metal fatigue reasons and is bounding down the road - that's a thing that happens, and a thing that in no way will be reported before it becomes relevant.
If a self driving car can't handle this sort of thing (or an accident and coming on a flagger) autonomously, it has no business being allowed on the road.
And if it can - then there's no need to have a centralized database of weird things, because it can deal with the range of events autonomously.
> And if it can - then there's no need to have a centralized database of weird things, because it can deal with the range of events autonomously.
'Conditions on top of the road' (vehicles, debris, etc.) and 'conditions of the road itself' are not the same thing and I'm not sure why you think that they are.
Start talking about 99.998% or so, OK, now it's worth sitting down with the math. But 98% accuracy at avoiding construction/existing crashes/etc is horrible.
Define -
1. Several.
2. Not working.
Disc: Googler but I don't know if that's necessary since I don't work at Waymo.
Self-driving will arrive eventually, but don't hold your breath.
I don't think we quite need AGI to make something like a commercial urban taxi service work. For any given place, we can substitute a very large amount of training data. And I think we can get there through an approach like Waymo, where the taxi's number one job is to ask for central human help if it's in the slightest confused or at risk of causing harm. But even that will be a very long slog.
And for the supposed goal of "full self-driving", I agree that is basically AGI, because it requires levels of judgment that even humans struggle with. The other day I came across some Covid-related road changes and I had to reason about human intent as expressed in roads while exchanging human social signals with the people around me.
Brooks suggests we instead may see people trying to simplify the problem by banning humans and/or human drivers from areas where we want automated driving. That's anthema to me, but given the history of building to favor cars vs other modes and given the vast amounts of money behind these efforts, it wouldn't shock me that it turns out that way.