Comment by RealityVoid
19 hours ago
We are _miles_ behind successful embodied AI. The demos are cool but the success rates are not high enough.
You can tell we're on the cusp when level 5 self driving cars are common an you have multiple companies deploying them on the street. Google is doing great work but the poured TONS of effort into it and the thing still needs intense stacks of perception and processing. Much more than I've seen any humanoids pour into it.
L5 SDV's are much easier to get than humanoids and the have tangible economic benefit. My thesis is that those will come first.
I'm really curious how quickly we would have huge numbers of L5 SDV if we societally accepted ~equal rates of injury and death, both of passengers and pedestrians. I want to be very clear, I'm not advocating for this (and even if I was, I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting society more broadly to go along), but part of me thinks that the primary hold up isn't actually capacity but instead standards.
This doesn't really argue against your point, because the standards are what they are, and like I said, I have no idea how one would go about changing them if one even decided they wanted to. And given what they are, it has taken, as you point out, enormous amounts of effort to reach those standards in a practical way.
That all being said, while I agree that SDV's are in many respects easier than other robotics tasks, they are also somewhat uniquely dangerous. Other categories of task, while potentially more complicated, won't have to worry nearly so much about safety, and so may be operating under a different constraint regime. I think this means that we may see adoption happen at a much more accelerated rate than we have seen in the automotive space.
Will we all be more or less flesh and bot in the future? Robocop style
Standards are not higher for self driving cars. Musk lied a lit about capability and safety of self driving, creating impression that it is safer then humans driving.
So far, they are not.
I have no idea where you get this impression. Tesla is no where close to the majority (or even plurality) of fully autonomous self driving miles. Waymo is dramatically safer (less injuries, not quite enough data yet to be certain about fatalities, but they are lower than average, we just can't yet claim statistical significance) than human drivers.
I haven't seen good stats on Tesla (they are less transparent than Waymo), but it would shock me if they weren't also at least slightly safer than the average human driver. Human drivers are really bad at driving.
But even if Tesla isn't safer, taken as a whole, the self driving industry as it currently exists still probably is, purely because it's mostly Waymo, and Waymo is dramatically safer.