> Waymo cars could drive on any US road, they don’t need detailed mapping efforts. 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. Supersonic aircraft for example exist but you can’t book a supersonic flight NYC to LA. What you’re arguing is affordable mass market self driving cars don’t exist which is a strawman that has little to do with if self driving cars exist.
> 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.
What do you mean by "the technology exists"? Sure, computers exist, neural networks and machine learning exist, sensors exist. Even geofenced, unprofitable operations like Waymo's exist. But that doesn't mean self-driving cars exist. And yes, of course it has to be mass market. The self-driving story would be pointless if it weren't; that's the whole reason VCs are betting billions on it.
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.)
Computers clearly existed before the 1970’s even though nobody was buying personal computers back then. We are at the earliest version of self driving where it’s not affordable for individuals and the use cases are very limited, but that’s not nothing.
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.
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.
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