Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

I don't think he's a fraudster. I think he's a visionary who sometimes sees things more the way he imagines them than the way they really are.

Things aren't as black and white as a bunch of people on here make them out to be. It's possible to deliver great products while dreaming too big and failing on others. The quality of being able to take risks and fail repeatedly until finally succeeding is one that most entrepreneurs possess.

I don't know why everyone gives this guy such a hard time. And I don't know why he has to be either a genius or a crackpot but not both at the same time. He can be enormously successful - like getting a new car company off the ground, making electric cars mainstream, putting unprecedented driving aids in the hands of consumers, rocket launches at an incredibly affordable cost - and not hit a home run with other ambitious projects like hyperloop, underground tunnels, robotaxis, etc.

Personally, I think the robotaxi idea is stupid. I get that there's a market for autonomous fleet vehicles but which individual car buyers are asking for a taxi service? I didn't buy a 70k car so that it could drive a bunch of strangers around and make me a couple bucks on the side. And, assuming they pull it off (which I doubt), I'd be pretty pissed if the cost of new Teslas went up because of the availability of some service I had no interest in to begin with. It would alienate me as a customer.

That said, I love my Tesla. I use Autopilot every day and it has been life changing. It's not perfect, but it works well enough for 90% of my driving. I rode in one of those self driving Lyft cars recently. It required 2 operators, the driver had to repeatedly take over and it was very similar to my Tesla in terms of ability. The difference is the Tesla is in the hands of consumers. It would be very difficult for me to go back to a regular gas car and I don't think I could go back to daily driving without advanced driver aids like Autopilot.

I have my doubts about city self driving. When I'm coming up to a light and it's obstructed by a big truck that's in front of me I wonder how they will solve that problem. Or railroad tracks, pedestrians, animals running into the road, etc. Those seems like insurmountable problems to me. I'm willing to wait and see though. They've already achieved more than I thought I would see in my lifetime. I won't begrudge them the occasional failure.

Stockfish isn't an AI, just an expert system. It was designed from the ground up to play chess.

AlphaZero is generalized AI. It was designed to learn how to do things - like play chess. The fact that it easily beat a custom-designed expert system with only a few hours of learning time is incredible. It's a different order of complexity altogether. It may not be human intelligence, but it's a great deal closer to how humans function than how machines (like Stockfish) function.

We need transportation. A world of sitting on our butts in front of a computer isn't a solution to much of anything. Maybe we don't need to actually operate the vehicle, but we need the vehicle.

I'm not walking halfway across the country just to visit my mother.

In safety-critical systems, failures are usually measured in (severity) x (probability) (and sometimes including a 'detectability' measure).

So a resulting 'acceptable' metric could factor in those less severe cases even if they occur at a higher probability. Scores outside this range would then trigger a redesign to bring it within acceptable boundaries.

I think the difficulty will be in 1) getting a consensus on what the resultant score should be and 2) getting enough information to estimate it in a statistically significant sense.

I'm going to be the contrarian here and say that they quoted people and events from some of the laggards or less advanced companies (like Uber's crash, which was totally preventable). I see much more optimism from the leaders in the space, although it's not like they are planning 100% self-driving taxis next year.

Also, keep in mind that the fair comparison is whether the cars outperform the average rate of human drivers. It doesn't have to be perfect.