Comment by lemming
4 days ago
That’s irrelevant though. If the system requires human intervention, then it’s not fully autonomous by definition. See https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-... for example:
The companies do not advertise this feature out loud too much, but they do acknowledge it, and the reports are that it happens somewhere between every one to two miles traveled.
That’s… not very autonomous.
It’s not irrelevant because those are fundamentally different modes of operating / troubleshooting. You say they have someone drive it. I say they don’t. We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems.
Furthermore 2 miles of autonomous driving is… autonomous. And over time that will become 3 then 4 then 5. Perhaps it never reaches infinite autonomy but an hour of autonomous driving is more than enough to get most people most places in a city and I’d bet you money that we’ll reach that point within a decade.
You say they have someone drive it.
I didn't say that. But they're not fully autonomous.
We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems.
This whole subthread started with the assertion:
Just like we will never have fully self-driving cars...
So we did start out by discussing whether current Waymo is fully autonomous or not. It then devolved into nit-picking, but that was where the conversation started.
FWIW I agree that Waymo is an amazing achievement that will only get better. I don't know (or care, frankly) if they will ever be fully autonomous. If I could, I'd buy one of those cars right now, and pay a subscription to cover the cost of the need for someone to help the car out when it needs it. But it's incorrect to say that they don't need human operators, when they clearly currently do.