zlacker

It's easy to dismiss the future when it seems far away but right now, there's a rather significant risk of people ending up with egg on their face. People are talking years, not decades at this point when it comes to AGI. Never mind self driving cars.

FSD when it starts working, (there is no if IMHO), will be a pretty significant but minor milestone in comparison.

Most people aren't particularly good drivers. Indeed the vast majority of lethal accidents (the statistics are quite brutal for this) are caused by people driving poorly and could be close to 100% preventable with a properly engineered FSD system.

Something that drives better on average than a human driver is not that ambitious of a goal, honestly. That's why you can already book self driving taxis in a small but growing number of places in the US and China (which isn't waiting for the US to figure this out) and probably soon a few other places. Scaling that up takes time. Most of the remaining issues are increasingly of a legislative nature.

Safety is important of course. Stopping humans from killing each other using cars will be a major improvement over the status quo. It's one of the major causes of death in many countries. Insurers will drive the transition once they figure out they can charge people more if they still choose to drive themselves. That's not going to take 20 years. Once there is a choice, the liability law suits over human caused traffic deaths are not going to be pretty.

>>jilles+(OP)
> Most people aren't particularly good drivers. Indeed the vast majority of lethal accidents (the statistics are quite brutal for this) are caused by people driving poorly and could be close to 100% preventable with a properly engineered FSD system

I'm gonna take issue with this. A properly engineered FSD system will refuse to proceed into a dangerous situation where a human driver will often push their luck. Would a full self driving car just... decline to drive you somewhere if the conditions were unsafe? Would this be acceptable to customers? Similar story for driving over the speed limit.

>>Eamonn+q5
I think it's very clear that we /could/ engineer an automotive system that is much safe, even without self-driving tech, by modeling it on the aviation system: much more rigorous licensing requirements, certifications based on vehicle type, third-party traffic control, filing "drive plans", obsessive focus on reliability and safety. It would look a lot different from the current system, and there is no political will to get there, but the thought experiment shows that we /could/ prevent most car accidents.

>>Eamonn+q5
This is something I've wondered about when it comes to no-steering-wheel type self driving cars...I'd hate to get caught in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere and have my car just decide for me that it was too dangerous to proceed and pull over to wait it out.

>>jilles+(OP)
Actually, I think for FSD to work under any set of conditions, and with any vehicle, more or less requires AGI.

Until then, I'm guessing that FSD will have some limits to what conditions it can handle. Hopefully, it will know its limits, and not try to take you over a mountain pass during a blizzard.

>>Eamonn+q5
It's usually not black and white. Sometimes the safe way could simply be to reduce speed, change lanes pre-emptively, etc. And when an emergency situation does happen, reaction speed is key. Good judgment is doing things in a timely fashion and decisively. A distracted human would drop the ball on both fronts not realizing they are in danger and then doing the wrong thing or act too late or overreact.

That's how people get killed on roads. Early experience with self driving taxis seems to suggest that journeys are uneventful and passengers stop paying attention and leave the driving to the car. So, yes, they quickly accept that the car is driving the car just fine.