I wonder how observable a 50% decrease in self-driving cars actually is. Recently it’s felt like the Cruise (and some Waymo) cars are EVERYWHERE in downtown SF.
No, what you are saying is inaccurate. There are plenty of people who've taken both sides of the predictions. Some people have been optimistic about beating the best players in the Go world:
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/
As for self-driving cars, they do work under good conditions but we still are at least a decade away. Plenty of people became optimistic about self-driving cars after the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge 11 years ago.
You have a lot more faith in technology than I do -- there will still be accidents, as good as self-driving cars are, they are still subject to the laws of physics and sometimes cars will run into each other or other objects or people.
We already have effectively self-driving cars with Uber and other car-sharing services, and all you need to do is go to SFO's departure level during peak travel times to see the traffic havoc that self-driving cars will bring -- too many cars and not enough curb space to drop off/pick up everyone.
When self-driving cars are cheap and plentiful then downtown streets will look the same -- self-driving cars will more than double car traffic since instead of 200 employees driving to work and parking into the parking garage (making one trip), now 1000 employees will be dropped off by their self-driving car, which will then have to drive away to park or look for the next passenger, making a second trip on already crowded streets.
> Vogt said that “as soon as the end of the year” it may have “hundreds” of vehicles “covering all of San Francisco.”
It's getting harder for the doubters to claim that this is all just a fad and self-driving cars will never become mainstream. I assume the remaining argument is "Well sure, but they'll never work in the rain or snow", so I hope that these self-driving services grow quickly enough that they are able to tackle deployment in rainier cities within a few years.
Did anyone claim _this_ was decades away? The claim is usually about when self-driving cars will actually be viable for anyone to use in arbitrary areas, not when experimental pilot programs are launched in individual cities.
I think your predictions are 100% accurate, but I also think as the fleet becomes more self-driving and as streets and other public infrastructure are redesigned to accommodate the new paradigms I believe these problems around traffic, congestion, and safety will be solved eventually by automated vehicles.
That is to say I believe human-driving is at a local maxima and it will take accepting a negative dip if we want to progress on this front.
It's a little gloomy to see how early most of the predictions are, they were overly-optimistic by 10-20 years in most cases.
Has anyone ever tried aggregating popular predictions over time? It would be interesting to see a history of predictions for self-driving cars up to now.
No, he's not. Autonomous vehicles and household robots existed when he made these predictions. The predictions are about the ubiquity and widespread, mass market adoption of these things - which has not happened. Yes, the robots and driver assistance systems are better, sometimes hugely improved, and more widespread than 20 years ago, but the operative word in the predictions is MOST and that is where they fall down, and fail to be true.
It's funny how this shall be a city of the future, when obviously it can only be built with technology from the present. Claiming that in the city there will be self driving cars, when this technology clearly isn't ready yet seems like an odd bet on what the future will be more than anything.
I heard one plan was to gain market share and eventually replace drivers with self-driving vehicles altogether, but I should note I'm spreading at least third-degree hearsay.
We're going to have autonomous cars that can drive SF-LA long before we have high-speed rail. Self-driving cars from the big players are planned for the 2020-2021 model years.
There are certainly some overly optimistic timelines being promised by some people and companies, but "several decades" seems extremely pessimistic. There are self-driving cars driving all over San Francisco (and presumably other cities) with minimal human driver intervention. I'm sure they're not perfect, and they might not be as good as whatever human driving ability baseline will be needed for mainstream and regulatory acceptance of self-driving cars, but I don't think there's any huge leap (like the development of AGI) required to get to that acceptance from where we are now.
Technically, self-driving cars are about 1 year out from being better than human drivers under normal highway driving conditions. If they continue to follow that curve of progress, then by (my hand wavey estimates) 2018 you should see micro-mapped urban driving scenarios (similar to google car in the bay area) capable of responding to traffic lights, construction lights, 2019 you should should see exception based systems (Construction pylons, road flares), 2020 gets you responding to Traffic Police, hand waves, and 2021 fills in the gaps that I'm not thinking of.
So, in theory, by end of 2021, within the Bay Area (at least South Bay - Think Mountain View/Cupertino Area), Ford should be able to start deploying on a Trial Basis, automated fleets of cars that will, more safely than humans, pick up and deliver people under good driving conditions, during the day, over very micromapped routes.
Once they get that nailed, they should be able to start expanding to other neighborhoods in the Bay Area, until by 2028-2030, an automated car should be able to pick up and deliver you anywhere in the SFBAY area that has presumably been micromapped, while at the same time providing pretty decent highway automated driving experiences for good portions of California.
Based on those lessons, (and probably in parallel with the California Experience) - other countries/states/cities will likewise be micro-mapping their road systems, and also creating "Automated Capable Areas" - that will, over time, merge - until eventually you should be able to get, over well known roads, in non-inclement weather conditions from pretty much anywhere in the United States to Any other area, more safely than you would with a human. My prediction is 2050 at the latest, and 2040 if there is aggressive investment. (The actual data probably lands somewhere between those two).
Honestly, human drivers are so horrible, it's hard to believe that with just a few hundred billion dollars of investments over the next fifteen years, that we shouldn't be able to come up with something better.
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