I sure am! I'm also aware that they can't be used as an autonomous taxicab service almost anywhere, and that Waymo is not pushing hard for expansion. So, look, there's certainly some nuance here. Waymo's cars may well be safer than the average driver, *in places where they have extremely good inch-by-inch mapping data*, and *in some weat…
I'm also aware that they can't be used as an autonomous taxicab service almost anywhere, and that Waymo is not pushing hard for expansion.
So, look, there's certainly some nuance here. Waymo's cars may well be safer than the average driver, *in places where they have extremely good inch-by-inch mapping data*, and *in some weather conditions*, and *while driving in somewhat restricted ways that don't express the range of driving that normal people do* (such as taking unprotected left turns and going around double-parked cars and so forth). And that's legitimate. I think we can round that off to "not safer than the average driver," but if you want to express that as "safer than the average driver but not well-suited to driving in all the places and conditions where the average driver can," then that's cool too.
But what's very clear is that in 2016 or so, we'd seen these great strides since 2007, where each year autonomous cars got vastly better than the previous, and where a straight-line extrapolation put full-self-driving in like 2018 or so, maybe skeptically 2020. And then, just as abruptly as that progress started, it flattened way the hell out. And it has not been because the government jumped in their way.
I sure am!
I'm also aware that they can't be used as an autonomous taxicab service almost anywhere, and that Waymo is not pushing hard for expansion.
So, look, there's certainly some nuance here. Waymo's cars may well be safer than the average driver, *in places where they have extremely good inch-by-inch mapping data*, and *in some weather conditions*, and *while driving in somewhat restricted ways that don't express the range of driving that normal people do* (such as taking unprotected left turns and going around double-parked cars and so forth). And that's legitimate. I think we can round that off to "not safer than the average driver," but if you want to express that as "safer than the average driver but not well-suited to driving in all the places and conditions where the average driver can," then that's cool too.
But what's very clear is that in 2016 or so, we'd seen these great strides since 2007, where each year autonomous cars got vastly better than the previous, and where a straight-line extrapolation put full-self-driving in like 2018 or so, maybe skeptically 2020. And then, just as abruptly as that progress started, it flattened way the hell out. And it has not been because the government jumped in their way.
This kind of just glosses over the fundamental fact that we don't have a way to measure the improvements here like we do for other things like LLM's.
This very article you're commenting on has a nice benchmark. What's the equivalent for self-driving cars?