I Was Proved Fucking Right
Peak "driverless car discourse" was a few years ago. Some subjects don't just bring out disagreement, civil or otherwise, but extreme condescension....A bit like "Iraq war is a bad idea, yo," "driverless cars aren't going to work" brought out the kind of "you just don't know how the world works, silly child" haughty responses. And then once everyone (not everyone, but more people) realized Elon's cars were never going to work as promised, and even Waymo, which is doing it more sensibly, stopped promising the future was already here, people just stopped talking about it.
....The fatal flaw in the concept is even if they work surprisingly well - and even watching scary videos of them not working, they still do work surprisingly well - they absolutely require the thing that they are supposed to free us from. They require 100% driver attention for the moments when they fail, perhaps even more so than normal driving, which after awhile does become somewhat instinctive.
Well, now, hold on there. It's true that we haven't heard a lot from Waymo lately, but that's because they suspended testing during the pandemic. They may have lost a year, but as near as I can tell they're still basically on track. They're just more realistic about it than Elon.
But here's the part I don't get. I'm not trying to start a blog fight—I kind of miss them, but there aren't enough blogs left to risk one—but I find it odd that Duncan keeps talking about the "fatal flaw" being that driverless cars have to work perfectly, more or less. That's true, but far from being a deep secret that he alone has figured out, it's something that every single person who works on driverless technology is keenly aware of.¹ It's precisely the thing they're trying to accomplish. I think it's fair to say that it's turned out to be harder than anyone thought, even after they admitted it was harder than they thought, but 2025 isn't here yet! We still have a few years to go before the current predictions about fully driverless cars have to be shitcanned.
As for "people stopped talking about it," that's wildly the opposite of the truth. Not only are people still talking about it, but every car manufacturer on the globe has jumped on board. Maybe this hasn't produced banner headlines on a monthly basis in the New York Times, but the auto industry is completely abuzz about it. Just last month we were all talking about Apple and Hyundai in negotiations to build a plant to manufacture driverless cars.
Anyway, the general chatter about driverless cars has been muted lately because of the pandemic and also because it's been overshadowed by the boom in electric car hype, but it's still out there. I continue to predict that by 2025 I will be able to tell a car to take me to Duncan's address, and then sit back and take a nap until we get there.²
¹Except maybe Elon, of course.
²Though I suppose I'll still have to wake up once in a while to pump some gas. I don't think anyone has automated that yet.
BTW, Kevin, you are wrong about a second point: Blogfights are good! They are fun and they grow the readership.
Bring back WARBLOGS.
Food Fight!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLdO2V1CTF0
"it's turned out to be harder than anyone thought, even after they admitted it was harder than they thought,"
For many years I managed software development projects. For a lot of that time I was managing the managers who managed the projects, which was a lot harder than managing the projects themselves, in particular because of Kevin's observation quoted above. The Rhodes Rule for project cost estimating was this:
(1) Estimate your project with sufficient slack to accommodate the known difficulties as well as some unforeseen problems.
(2) Every project is harder than you realize, so adjust your estimate accordingly.
(3) You have still not thought of all the things that can go wrong, so go back to step (1) and repeat the cycle.
737 Max.
Isn't that all you need to think of when you think a collection of remote software programmers can outperform a single human being with eyes that are superior to a lens and orders of magnitude more synapses than bytes (or bits) that any onboard computer central processing unit could ever contain?
Software outperforms humans all the time, in myriad areas. Our modern world would be impossible were this not the case.
I think everybody acknowledges this dynamic isn't yet sufficiently refined yet with respect the operation of vehicles. Yet.
I thought we already had driverless cars. They are called "busses".