One good sign we are all just barely evolved monkeys is how long it takes to bring something to usability. Full AI driving is a good example. But plenty of other things were like that, flying, medicine past, present and probably future, cars you drove yourself that weren’t total death traps (took like 70 years and still isn’t great), and pretty much every anything else you can think of really.
We will eventually get to full self driving. It won’t be Elon but it isn’t a total fail in general it isn’t there yet. It will be the thing whether it is 5, 10 or 50 years.
I just have the auto pilot and never really use it. It’s pretty freaky to me at a reasonable speed however in stop start traffic on the highway my wife loves it and uses it all the time in those conditions.
Opposite for me. I love using it at cruising speed on the highway, but dislike it in stop and go traffic mainly because the acceleration/deceleration is a bit jarring. I pretty much completely trust it on controlled access highways at 70mph though.
Yeah, no. Self-driving is a bad idea; it’s just machine vision, traffic data, machine hearing, and a poorly coded algorithm (like most software) that tries its best to mimic a human driver while obeying the rules of the road. Old people who can no longer drive due to a loss of eyesight or poor hearing should, if they can afford to buy a super-expensive self-driving car, just hire a trustworthy driver instead. This would add real service-sector jobs to the economy.
Also, have you seen how bad these cars are at actually driving? What advantages do self-driving cars offer vs., well, what we used to call cars? Or automobiles? The whole idea is that the machine is already self-moving; you’re basically arguing that drivers’ shouldn’t be in direct control of their vehicles. This seems like a case of moral hazard, where the people least able to participate in a market want to dictate its terms for the entire country.
One big issue here is that North America’s city design is absolute shit and the struggles of self driving cars to navigate poorly designed spaces that include cars, transit, bikes, and pedestrians should be blaring alarm that the city designs are garbage, not that self driving cars are “failing”.
This seems like moving the goalposts so that the self-driving car’s algorithm can’t be wrong. A car driving by algorithm that can’t navigate the world as it finds it is just a terrible product. Individuals need individual transportation systems (cars) to participate in commerce, exercise their constitutional rights to travel, and to maintain boundaries and privacy.
I wouldn’t categorize it as moving the goal posts, it’s more “are we learning what we really should be learning”. It’s not an either/or - you can look at the results of self driving car efforts and conclude both that city design is bad AND self driving cars may not be as viable long term as hoped.
Oh, sure. I guess I meant that it seemed like a move of the goalposts. I agree that city design is also terrible. I am not an urban engineer, though, and don’t really know where to start there. I am just talking about what should count as a functioning version of this technology, and saying that I haven’t seen one yet.
Not going to nitpick this post, but I have seen how incredible one car is at self driving personally as the vehicle operator. Was truly one of the most awe-inspiring things I’ve ever witnessed (45 minute drive through suburban, highway, and rural conditions). The idea that they are all “bad at actually driving” is a pretty poor assertion. There are some situations that they excel in, and some that need additional development and honing. But, in my opinion, the combination of an attentive operator and the FSD beta that I’ve used must surely be safer than the “average driver” and would bigly reduce vehicle deaths per mile driven. But sure, you need to click the thing off and do some manual maneuvering here and there and pay attention and stuff.
Ha! That’s a reference to modernism in the sense of the literary movement; you’re thinking of progressivism, which I actually generally dislike. See Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven.
I mean, if you really want to know, it’s actually one of a group of three names used by three boys, including me, at my private high school in Savannah, GA: It’s Mr. Name, Mr. Who, and Dr. Modern. My mother’s an English professor, if that helps you see that it assuredly was mostly a literary reference, but also a little bit of an expression of interest in technological progress, which is possible and real and great when it happens.
But, honestly, a lot of times I basically think the traditional way of doing things (e.g., record players, cocktails made from a shaker instead of pre-mixed by machine) was honestly better and the new technology offers no meaningful improvements over the old version.
I am very, very critical of technology and basically think that software that’s not mathematically perfect according to customer expectations is garbage.