Comment by n6242
10 hours ago
Some of us still remember 2016, when we had a couple of cars sorta half-driving themselves, and Tesla, Uber and others promised we were only one year or two away from three million people in the US working as drivers being out of a job. And here we are, a decade later. AI is pretty amazing, but companies have a tendency to severely and comically overestimate and oversell it's capabilities, and underestimate the challenges.
> And here we are, a decade later.
With Waymo and Tesla increasingly doing what they said they would do, and a small number of early adopters happily paying money for their services, that do work.
So what's the critique? That the timelines are not correct? Sure. And how about the timeline of the people who said "research level math, never in my lifetime" and the people inside the ai companies who are apparently increasingly spooked by how quick the progress is? How about the various levels of code/programming jobs that AI was supposedly never going to be able to do, but, in reality, now just does?
We are engaging in some very one-sided discrediting, and I am not sure, why.
And, those companies are notably avoiding wet climates because they still struggle with self-driving in inclement weather. It's probably going to be another decade before we get to the point where these things can handle every situation. Just like all other engineering, the first 90% is the easy part.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/self-driving-cars-dont-do-snow-...
Alas, you will notice that article is 1.5 years old. Update on this issue (albeit soon from a year ago too): https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive...
More telling: Waymo just rolled out in Denver (1 month ago or so), apparently fairly confident they got this handled given the upcoming winter.
Progress on the obvious stuff keeps happening (which kind of brings me my to the first comment here).
But also: It does not have to do "snow" to be useful! A lot of cars/people don't drive when it snows heavily, and that's something we have always been okay with (at a societal level, YMMV of course). If was only useful 95% of the year that's still great. A lot of technology works like that.
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I remember a biologist wryly commenting that it took a lot longer to evolve good senses and appendages in nature than to evolve human intelligence, compared to the ape niveau.
Maybe the really hard thing isn't abstract cognitive capability, but perception+movement.
Moravec's argument strikes again.
Driving a car is unimaginably more difficult than proving the Riemann hypothesis.
You just don’t notice that because evolution has given you 99% of what is needed to drive a car before you were even born.