I like that Waymo is confident enough in their system to put it out there for people to use. But honestly, I think that their reasoning for releasing it is exactly to reduce worries in people, that 'it'll never happen feeling'. I think they needed to put something (before it was even 99% ready) out, otherwise people would lose hope and investors balk at the progress. I really do think that it'll never happen, at least in the ecosystems current form. There needs to be special lanes or routes that self driving cars can take, special pick-up points, etc. Humans take risks while driving every day, the problem is, that we have an incredibly good picture of the risks involved in everyday things. Machines don't have this sense perfectly attenuated yet, and I have yet to see evidence that they ever will. With us, there is no variability in our senses. Our eyes mostly work the same every day, our perception skills doesn't change. Machines cannot even trust their senses, and their code has to reflect that.
Obviously, this is all speculation on my part, but when I see videos of waymo sitting in roadways and parking lots, blocking traffic, pedestrians, and just the overall flow of life, the more that I get the feeling that machines should not be allowed to participate.
But people also shouldn't waste so much time of their life stuff in traffic driving vehicles either. I mean, the ideal city would probably be self-driving trains, people movers, and free scooters, segways, or wheelchairs everywhere. No AI vision systems needed.
If you live in urban Japan, do you ever need a car?
To replace all 273 million vehicles in the US with self-driving EVs would cost around $10 trillion @ $50k per car. You could built a national network of self-driving lanes for a fraction of that. You could build rail lines and subways in every major metro area.
The major upside of a car vs train though is privacy. You may not mind taking the train in Japan, but in SF, it can be disgusting, and so private vehicles and American culture may be inseparable.
But that still leaves many other solutions, like we have bike lanes, and HOV lanes, we could build AV-only lanes, and prohibit AVs from working (requiring manual takeover) when you depart them.
On long drives to work, you'd just stay in the AV lane and chill, and when you got close to an exit, you'd have to take over. It would still be a win if on a 1hr commute you only did 15 minutes of actual driving.
> You could built a national network of self-driving lanes for a fraction of that. You could build rail lines and subways in every major metro area.
Most of them will be built by government making huge losses, they will go from nowhere to nowhere and they will not function as intended. The California high speed train is a great example. Not to mention $50K will be put by people but the national rail network will have to built by government (not that they have to but very likely they will grab this opportunity).
Human senses may be fairly consistent day to day, but variability across humans is quite significant. Even a single person's faculties (vision, cognition, focus) change drastically over longer periods of time, or when they're tired, sick, or worse (drunk). Machines at least have standardized hardware with self-test protocols and onboard diagnostics. There are innumerable scenarios in which machines have no good solution yet, but I suspect over time the heuristics will reach a threshold of "good enough for public use."
Obviously, this is all speculation on my part, but when I see videos of waymo sitting in roadways and parking lots, blocking traffic, pedestrians, and just the overall flow of life, the more that I get the feeling that machines should not be allowed to participate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5SeVxYAZzk