But: there are very large numbers of these edge cases and they are of the kind where new ones keep popping up all the time. This is a very easy problem for the first 99% or so and then the last 1% is super hard.
Indeed, and we aren't any closer compared to say 5 years ago. That is more or less my point: you can solve for some of this and then you are still left with a mountain more. And then at some point there is an even harder problem to deal with: how to ensure that fixing one problem won't regress one or more others.
That's just flat wrong.
And that may well require another leap of capabilities on the AI front, it might even require GAI. But you are entirely welcome to your own opinion, as I am to mine, but after watching the self driving industry since the 80's my timeframe is something like 25 years before fusion will arrive.
There may be some intermediary 'artificial artificial intelligence' solution where when stuck a remote driver can take over. But that has its own set of problems and I don't want to set this up as a strawman.
It's real progress. Anyone around Mountain View, or SF will have seen the progress with their own eyes. It's not a theoretical debate.
But that's the whole point: if this were a reality there wouldn't be a maybe there. So thanks for making my point.
"Materially closer" isn't the bar to cross the bar to cross is "It just works" which is for me what I'm getting at when I say that we are not 'closer', because it's a binary thing, arrival means 'it works' not that we have made some incremental change towards an ill defined goal.
The 'it works some of the time or even most of the time' bar was crossed years ago, but it needs to work all of the time.
In your view we are within striking distance of the moon, another couple of piles of stones and we are there. In my view, I'm not sure that it will just take more stones and not a better technology, and I'm beginning to lean more and more towards the latter because the problems that we were seeing 10 years ago we are still seeing today: more and more edge cases. And edge cases can be a symptom of a problem that is almost solved or it can be a symptom of a problem that is being solved using the wrong toolset, especially when there are lots of them and new ones keep popping up all the time.
Clear now?
And by the way: none of this is to imply that what has been done isn't impressive, the MB statement that they will accept liability if their software is in control of the vehicle is a step in the right direction and shows a lot of confidence. But it's incremental progress towards a goal that might not be reachable in that way.
Just come visit San Francisco and see the evidence. Look in the horse's mouth, so to speak. The cars are driving around a complex city, without a driver, and doing an amazing job. The progress is real.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I think what the other commenter was getting at is that: if there were 10 problems that needed solving 5 years ago, and in the course of solving those 10 problems you discovered 100 more than needed solving that you weren't initially aware of, then sure you got closer to the goal, but the progress was so tiny that it's almost not relevant.
I'm personally not arguing one way or another, but that's how I read the other person's comment.
I know the whole human flight is different to bird flight argument, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out. Exciting times :)
If the technology stagnates, the hardware stops improving, and the software stops getting better, then we would hit the limit pretty quickly.
> After all humans don't drive by analysing 1 frame at a time, we have a model of how the world works, we anticipate, we have intuition etc...
All self driving cars also maintain those models as well, and use frame by frame input to correct those models in real time (but they have already guessed where something is going to be 100+ frames from now).