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.
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...