I don't share your pessimism, I think having a geofenced self-driving experience, on select roads, with the option of occasional manual override by a remote operator, is definitely feasible in 10 years.
Geofenced limited access highways also seems like a fairly promising area.
It's amazing how many people bought into the hype that there would be widespread self-driving taxi services by the end of last decade and that kids growing up today would never need to learn to drive. Even a relative skeptic like Rodney Brooks is looking to be overly optimistic at this point. https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
I still think 10 years is optimistic. We are still years away from production, self-driving cars, and the majority of people will have to upgrade to them, which, alone, will take 10 years from the point self-driving cars become affordable.
As much as I want it, I don't think it will have much of an impact on my commuting life. I'll likely be about to retire before the impact is really felt.
Let's be honest, actual mass deployed self driving tech is probably 20 years away at minimum. I personally might be able to enjoy it just before I retire.
sorry but that is a very naive perception. what will happen in 10 years more realistically? things will get a bit better, regulations stiffen, maybe self-driving will be actually banned till it reaches maturity point (how to get there without millions beta testers is another topic).
don't hold your breath that some government in indonesia or africa or india will do anything for self-driving soon, nobody will be banning anything there. they'll keep using whatever can drive on the roads till it fails to move, regardless of some fancy self-driving high-tech.
There has been great progress made and I don't see any reason why we won't see them in less than a decade. However, this is only going to be in very specific areas. Really complex driving, like roads with no lines, a single lane but allows two directions, etc; I think that type of driving will take decades.
So in 8 years I can totally see getting off a plane, jumping into an autonomous car and having it drive me somewhere specific. But I can't see driving through all roads until much, much, much later.
I think 10 years is just a bit optimistic. I think it'll take about 10 years from the time we have the software/hardware at a point where it is ready. I think that could be 5 years. I think it'll be another 15-20 years after that where the majority of cars on the road are self driving. Baring any crazy legislation, which I don't think would happen, in the US anyway.
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.
I'm also guessing that, whether or not there's something at least very close to self-driving under many conditions in ten years, unless you really like being in full control, I'm guessing in ten years, you'll be looking enviously at those cars that can drive themselves around on the freeway most of the time.
I think your 10 year estimate is optimistic, but it is certainly coming to the point where the cars drive themselves. One of the interesting things about being driven, as opposed to driving, is that passengers rarely suffer from 'road rage.' That is a big win.
Perhaps more interesting will be the transition time, that point where half the cars are self driving and half are manually driven. Will manual drivers become more aggressive because they "know" the robo-cars will get out of their way? I expect it will be less fun before it is more fun.
We already have self driving cars running around Mountain View with little problems. Extending that progress to more extreme conditions doesn’t seem far fetched, especially when we continue to have technology advances in sensors (LIDAR) and AI control. 5 or 10 years might sound aggressive to many people, but 20 years doesn’t sound far off at all.
Yah, without any evidence to back it up my personal suspicion is that we'll arrive at a local maxima of "full self driving on highways and instrumented roads" in ~20 years. I think the area has a lot of potential, but so much of the hype (and stock price) is tied up with "a car that can drive better than a human everywhere" which seems impossible for anyone to produce.
Just like with IoT we'll eventually arrive at a boring, useful state...it will just take a while.
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