Comment by weego
4 years ago
It's forever off because it's the wrong solution to a problem that no one is invested in even fully identifying let alone working at.
My hot-take parallel argument is that full self driving is a smart road problem with 'dumber' cars and not a dumb road and smart cars problem. But there's no scope to VC of profit your way into smart road infrastructure so we do it the wrong way round and hope we can throw resources at it till its fixed.
You are correct. I would be plenty happy with 80% self-driving and lots of safety features, but the VCs want the robot trucks and taxis for their trillion dollar win. No way full self-driving can do the last mile or work in all conditions. For example, human eyes have pretty decent dynamic range in dark, snowy conditions. We basically make intuitive decisions about which patch of white stuff in the dark of night is the best one to smash through to get our driveways, and I don't think the computer vision is yet discerning enough to facilitate that.