Comment by DrillShopper 2 days ago
Oh really? What vehicle can I buy today, drive home, get twice the legal limit drunk, flop in the back alone to take a nap while my car drives me two hours away to a relative's house?
I'd really like to buy that car so I await your response.
The claim is that self driving is mundane - something everyone can have if they want. A standard feature, so entwined in the background of life that it is unremarkable.
Given that there is no system out there that I can own, jump in the back of in no condition to drive, and get to my destination safely defeats that claim. It's not even so mundane that everyone has the anemic Tesla self-driving feature that runs over kids and slams into highway barriers.
It may also be a matter of laws, but the underlying tech is also still not there given all the warnings any current "self driving car" systems give about having to pay attention to the road and keep your hands on the wheel even if the laws weren't there.
Could I get behind the wheel of my self driving car, drunk, and make it there safely? No, I definitely couldn't, and I understand why those laws exist with all of the existing failure modes of self driving cars.
People have called the current state of LLMs "sparkling AutoComplete". The current state of "self-driving cars" is "sparkling lane assist" with a chaser of adaptive cruise control.
You can do all that in a Waymo except for the “buy” part. When asked about that Sergey said “why do you want to own a car? You have to maintain it, insure it, park it at home and at work. Don’t you really just want to get where you’re going and have someone else figure out the rest?” This was back before google ate the evil pill. Now their philosophy is more like “don’t fall asleep, we can get a good deal on your kidneys, after that we’ll sell your mom’s kidneys too”
A Tesla is pretty close. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZfkU1QgTI
That's a jurisdiction problem, not a technology problem. No tech is foolproof, but even with the current technology someone would be much safer (for others, too) in the back seat than trying to drive tired, borderline DUI at night in unfamiliar town. Which many folks regularly do, for example on business travel.
The reason I cannot do this today is laws, not technology. My 2c.