Waymo, Cruise, and a few other companies are sending out empty cars to pick people up. The have off site people to remotely take over if the cars get stuck, but that’s in no way fast enough to deal with a safety issue.

>>This is the same way automation has always occurred. You get the machine to deal with 90%, 99%, then 99.9% etc of cases until people move from doing job X, to being backup, to troubleshooting problems.

Of course. We are now at maybe 20-30% coverage though. Once we are at 90%, maybe in 30-40 years, then we can start saying things like "we have self driving cars".

The point of these trials is to demonstrate safety not simply test limits. Waymo cars work fine in conditions and areas outside of their current tests.

So if you took an existing Waymo car and dropped it in a middle of a previously unmapped city, it would be "fine"?

The software however isn’t setup for non US road signs and laws for every country on the planet.

PS: I am ignoring sanity checks that would need to be removed. If the car thinks it drove to Hawaii then clearly something failed.

Neither of these is capable of being placed into a random environment and actually "driving" from environmental feedback with minimal directions (turn left, go right, stop) --- which most any human driver can easily do.

Really it’s little different than many modern drivers being dependent on the GPS for long trips.

Once you map all the roads and account for very imaginable situation and scenario --- the unexpected and unanticipated will still occur.

Mapping isn’t about unexpected situations beyond the loss of GPS.

"Just like people do" is only true if you see 7 year olds driving around, I imagine they would have similar capacity to make decisions on the road as Tesla FSD does. Except I imagine even a 7 year old wouldn't just let go of the wheel completely.

The use case of self driving taxi already exist as in you tell an app where you want to go and an empty car with AI driver shows up. The app doesn’t always summon an AI driver, but when humans and machines are doing the same job don’t expect the humans to win indefinitely.

Extract from [1]:

The basic navigation problem has been "solved" for decades. Back in Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, I watched a NavLab van rolling down a trail in Schenley Park behind my graduate student office. Since then, every few years we've been hearing announcements about how self-driving cars were just around the corner.

But between demos and actual products lies a huge chasm. Today, not only do self-driving cars still not exist after billions of dollars and decades of investment, but the experts admit that they are at least a decade away.

And no, you don't get to nit-pick what "self-driving car" means. It still means that I can get in, tell it to go to a destination that I would normally drive to, and then I can go to sleep. That's what's known in the trade as "Level 5" autonomy. Anything less than that is not the life-changing promise that attracts all this investment and press.

If your car can operate only on a few roads, then it's no better than one of those people-mover trains at airports. Those are driverless, too.

[1] https://www.robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2021-08-29-humanoid.h...

Coverage area doesn’t somehow require intelligence and these systems operate on far more than a few roads. The same hardware and software could operate on every road in the US at which it would ‘suddenly be intelligent’ even though nothing changed.

Look people always say whatever AI systems can do isn’t intelligent as soon as they can do it. Chess used to be considered a bastion of human supremacy over machines, then go, now the last gasps of self driving.

In 20 years people will say self driving cars aren’t intelligent because they don’t work in North Korea, even as young slowly people stop learning how to drive the same way humanity largely forgot how to drive a horse and buggy.

Coverage area is required for practical self-driving solutions, and today's ML based efforts are not close to producing it.

If you measure intelligence in this context by the ability to drive on any roads anywhere, then humans are beating the crap out of "AI".

Their limitation is legal not software.

Again, you’re mixing up “could drive” with actual ability to reliably take me where I want to go. Yeah, NavLab drove from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995. That doesn’t mean we had self-driving cars.

And no, Waymo’s limitation is not just legal. Where are you getting that impression from? Sure, they don’t have permits to do other routes, but there’s a good reason for that: they cannot stand behind their product except within their geofence.

I am not saying intelligence equals self driving. I am saying that even if you define it that way, we are far, far away still.

That’s got nothing to do with if the technology exists. Nuclear weapons clearly exist but that doesn’t mean you can nuke whoever you want. What you’re arguing is consumer level self driving cars don’t exist which is a strawman that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation.

> Waymo’s limitation is not just legal.

Waymo is currently testing driverless cars in every single state (CA, NV, FL) it’s legal for them to test in. Clearly that does suggest the limitation to add any more states is legal.

The problem is the insane amount of training needed. The current approach of running repeated learning iterations to iron out corner cases soon runs up against the long tail of thousands and thousands of tiny, unlikely-but-possible scenarios requiring more and more data. Every time you expand the scope of the self-driving car (different roadside conditions, behaviors of pedestrians and other drivers, new roads, weather, etc.), you discover more conditions for the model to train on.

You can't just say, "my model is intelligent. Now it's just an exercise for the reader to train the model on all possible scenarios, and voila! You have a self-driving system!". You have to actually train the model to produce a self-driving car.

This is a never-ending battle. Let me point out how utterly different it is from how human drivers deal with new conditions.

No, self-driving cars don't exist. Not yet. And it's not for legal reasons.

(One technical solution to the self-driving problem would be to also modify all the roads and surroundings to reduce the number of unlikely scenarios that our models have to learn. But this kind of solution is challenging for non-software reasons, plus it would not really be "intelligent" in terms of AGI. It would be more like a tramway. It wouldn't be sexy.)

The self driving car you want to buy doesn’t exist, but they are already providing a valuable service. Saying well VC’s want to replace all Taxi drivers and all Long haul truckers and all … just means that development will continue but that’s true of most products. We hardly say the CPU doesn’t exist because Intel and AMD are still spending billions on R&D. All existing self driving car investments are really just peanuts compared to what companies will spend as the market matures and profits roll in.