Re:Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco
by notahacker on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @05:38PM
(#30861113)
> 10 years is a long time and progress is not always linear. Think about what happened to the internet between 1995 and 2005.
And then compare it to what happened to the internet between 2005 and 2022...
Progress isn't always linear but it tends towards diminishing returns more often than exponential progress.
And we're not talking simple things like "can billions of people and Moore's law result in something a bit more exciting than Facebook with a newsfeed and ads and YouTube without Flash", we're talking about progress in the form of monotonic improvement in complex intractable software to solve edge cases the dev team haven't even thought of where the failure mode involves corpses, and do it to the satisfaction of regulators across many jurisdictions.
The gap between "drive 10 miles without serious incident this time" and "consistently drives a billion miles between incidents serious enough to be fatal without any possibility of intervention" is enormous.
And then compare it to what happened to the internet between 2005 and 2022...
Progress isn't always linear but it tends towards diminishing returns more often than exponential progress.
And we're not talking simple things like "can billions of people and Moore's law result in something a bit more exciting than Facebook with a newsfeed and ads and YouTube without Flash", we're talking about progress in the form of monotonic improvement in complex intractable software to solve edge cases the dev team haven't even thought of where the failure mode involves corpses, and do it to the satisfaction of regulators across many jurisdictions.
The gap between "drive 10 miles without serious incident this time" and "consistently drives a billion miles between incidents serious enough to be fatal without any possibility of intervention" is enormous.