If I could make a $10,000 bet with John Carmack, I'd go the way Atwood has. No way there will be fully self-driving cars by 2030. That's only 8 years away. Fully self-driving cars need one of two things:

A) All cars are self-driving, and are networked, and centrally controlled. No exceptions.

B) The AI is smart enough that we should be worried about the ethical implications.

If an AI can react to terrible human drivers as well as a good human driver can, then I'd invite that AI over for dinner.

That's not sufficient - nowhere near sufficient. If an AI can react properly when kids are playing in a 5mph zone with cars parked on either side of the street, before their ball bounces into the street. If it can react appropriately to seeing a young kid clearly struggling to ride a bike. If it can understand that the tennisball bouncing across the road will be followed shortly by an enthusiastic dog... et cetera, et cetera.

I don't need an AI to compensate for shitty driving (taking a roundabout the wrong way). I need it to drive so as to protect non-vehicles that it encounters.

Basically, if you can find videos online of Waymo giving up and requesting backup for a situation not severe enough for humans to do the same, then you are not really at level 5 yet. If you cannot rely on the car to handle driving though any circumstance you could reasonably expect your hired chauffeur to handle, well then you are not level 5 yet. Examples of situations where humans give up are hurricanes, and blizzards.

And there are plenty of videos of it stopping for situations where no human would ever be equally confused, plus a good handful of videos of the cars doing absolutely unacceptable things resulting in near misses.

Are you really that confident that by 2030 Waymo's roadside assistance program will be disbanded, or at least reduced to a killswitch, summoning a replacement car and a tow truck (because obviously the car must be broken if assistance was called)? Because if they need more than that, it sure isn't level 5 yet.

IMO, minimum requirement for level 5 driving is merely to match human driver accident rates.

Minimum requirement for nerds, maybe. Minimum requirements for ordinary folks will probably be more along the lines of "will be noticeably better than me on average" and "will not make any given mistake more frequently (or more severely) than I would".

i.e. I expect people a lot of people would want "strictly better than me on practically every axis" as their minimum requirement, not just "on par with me based on the average accident rate". People just aren't going to put up with seeing cars make dumb mistakes that they would never make, even if the accident rate ends up being good on average.

The best driver aid systems I've seen are still just well-executed implementations of lane keep/change assist and radar cruise control- technologies that have been available in luxury cars for ~15 years. None of this stuff is actually new technology. It took decades to make existing driver aid technologies reliable and cheap enough to make them available to the average new car buyer. I have no reason to believe it will get easier from here.

I also have no reason to believe that the legal dilemmas behind autonomous driving features will go away. One of two things must happen- in fatal accidents caused by a car operating autonomously:

1. The driver (occupant?) will be liable. OR,

2. The manufacturer will be liable.

Option (1) is unprecedented, morally reprehensible, and would likely be overturned when some manufacturer eventually screws up on a Ford Pinto scale. Option (2) means that autonomous driving features will forever be hampered by the "keep your hands on the wheel!" warning bells that we already deal with today.

> 2. The manufacturer will be liable.

We already have big corporations that will risk huge liabilities for fatal vehicle accidents; they're called insurance companies.

So there's precedent for big corporations risking huge liabilities. Just instead of collecting an annual "insurance premium" they'll be collecting an annual "self-driving service subscription"

Link for curious: https://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-matteson/module-1-why-do...

I understand you to mean that there was not a dramatic result; I believe there were results - engineers and managers changed their goals to include more testing of components, IIHS and regulators also added testing. Automakers do respond to forced recalls. Reputational harm taken as seriously as direct fines and punishment.