Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them.
For software, however, a rapid turn is often a possibility. See: AI for coding over the last 3-4 years.
AI autocomplete --> AI coding assistants --> vibe coding --> agent orchestration
Coders can now accomplish work that used to take a week or longer in a couple of hours, with the right tools and skills.
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A key issue the article implies is that the real world increasingly runs on software.
> Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them.
Yes. The bottleneck has been getting the cars manufactured.
It takes a certain amount of time to get a factory going, and then the product starts pouring out. Waymo used up the supply of Jaguars, about 3,500 of them. The Ioniq 5 plant is starting up.[1] Waymo has ordered 50,000 cars, all ready to have the self-driving electronics plugged in. Waymo gets out of the sheet metal bending business with this.
When I graduated a bit over 10 years ago some people were saying we'd have a permanent mars bases by now. When my parents graduated they were told they'd retire at 45 and have 3 days work week due to "automation", they're still working at 60+ today, more than back then actually
People should open history books and gain some political/historical culture, this thread is 90% wishful thinking and "if the lines continues straight from now we'll basically be gods in 5 years"
Just like the "if the lines continues to go up" argument...
The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position, but many people make a load of $$$ from selling the opposite position to gullible people
> The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position
Why? If someone running a company really believes that the line will soon stop going up and AI won't be replacing anyone, they could make the bet of strategically not investing in any AI initiatives, and instead investing in hiring and upskilling people who want to work without AI, and then just wait for the inevitable crash of all their competitors, no?
But that's circular - assuming that large investors are rational, and I do think they generally are, why wouldn't they strategically invest in anti-AI businesses?
"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year...
I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...
We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...
And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.
I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate
Certainly a well reasoned view, but I don't necessarily have to agree.
Even assuming the technological predictions to be correct, still not sure I agree on the need to "prepare" as how things work out in societies and economies might not be so easy to predict.
This strand of philosowank is just there to promote the idea you need to kill for the greater good. The only trolly problem that matters is brake maintenance.
Neither have I. The number of people who have encountered such events is probably close to negligible.
However I bet there is a good chance that will not be the case for self-driving cars. The reason is simple: human brains are slow.
When caught by surprise by an unexpected sudden obstacle a human driver takes about a second to realize something must be done and decide on braking or swerving in the fastest path, where the brain bypasses conscious decision making and uses the lower level fight or flight system. (Then another maybe 0.2 second to actually start swerving or 0.4 seconds to actually start pressing the brake--brake takes longer because of the need to move the foot to the brake pedal whereas the hands should already be on the steering wheel).
If they try to actually evaluate whether swerving or braking is the better choice before acting add another 0.3 to 0.5 seconds. That brings it up to around 1.6 to 2 seconds before they start actually acting, which most of the time is going to too late to actually affect things. Hence essentially no trolly problems for human drivers.
Compare to a self-driving car. The can detect the obstacle and predict the collision, and do a cycle of path planning before the retina has finished registering the obstacle and started transmitting that information to the brain.
By the time a human reaches the point where the brain knows something bad is happening and is starting to deal with it the self-driving car has had time to calculate numerous alternative trajectories to try to get around the object or stop before reaching it, taking into account predictions where all surrounding objects will move during the next few seconds, and calculate the damages for the trajectories that cannot avoid hitting something.
I've had few close calls, they are easy to come by in specific environments.
Typical situation - tight winding mountain (but well paved) roads to some remote villages where even basic small European cars need to slow down to walking pace to meet and pass, sometimes one has to reverse, very curvy. You go down, in your lane as much as possible, and behind some tight curve there is a) extremely slow cyclist; or b) somebody/something stationary, while in opposite direction there is at the worst place incoming car, also oblivious of the danger till last moment. Even rather slow driving won't magically remove all possible cases. Then its a question of hitting opposite car or that obstacle, and you have a split second to act, not really to decide.
Quick reaction and good brakes on both sides can save it, but there is a lot of room for disaster. Add truck/bus to the equation to make it more juicy where you pick your/your family possible death or that cyclist/stationary folks.
I mean, I'm very much tech-forward and have spent the past decade in major world cities and I've seen a driverless car once in my life. Sometimes things that seem inevitable really aren't.
I see driverless cars all the time in San Francisco and I'm eagerly awaiting the regulatory decisions that will allow them to be widely available in the bay area at large.
Such cars are already operating in shanghai. It's not talked about much in the west media, but that's just how news is today. Achievements are only so when done by the west!
Driverless car's only real obstacle is regulatory acceptance, not technical.
It's not driverless unless it doesn't have a driver. Some poor guy in hydrobad 'monitoring' (read frequently taking over from) ten cars at a time, while being paid a statistically insignificant portion of a western taxi drivers salary does not count as 'self driving'.
The ones talking about how hard it would be to chose which person to run over.
Additionally, I find it hard to believe that this would be a case of the future just not being distributed evenly.
But sure. The AI labs relying on hype stating 15-50% risk of building a magic entity is certainly a reliable number.