<story><title>Driverless cars are stuck in a jam</title><url>https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/10/10/driverless-cars-are-stuck-in-a-jam</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>theieindjri</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why so many otherwise smart people fell for FSD hype. I&amp;#x27;m not talking about the many con artists - I&amp;#x27;m talking about the tech-savvy people who genuinely bought into FSD hype.&lt;p&gt;How is it not obvious that FSD most likely requires artificial general intelligence and is, thus, probably somewhere between &amp;quot;many decades away&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;humans will never achieve it&amp;quot;?</text></item><item><author>crocal</author><text>The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average &amp;#x2F;better&amp;#x2F;. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or even rocket science.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moduspol</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a matter of defining &amp;quot;full self-driving.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re accustomed to horses and see someone selling cars, it&amp;#x27;d be reasonable to say, &amp;quot;Those are ridiculous. There are numerous places only my horses can reach. There will virtually never be a time cars fully replace horses.&amp;quot; And you&amp;#x27;d be right. It&amp;#x27;s still true--there are places horses can reach that cars cannot. But because of the value of cars, society has reoriented itself such that reaching those places doesn&amp;#x27;t matter to the vest majority of us.&lt;p&gt;I think self-driving cars will be the same. We don&amp;#x27;t need them to operate in every single road &amp;#x2F; circumstance ever. There may always be roads that self-driving cars can&amp;#x27;t drive on. But it&amp;#x27;ll become irrelevant because the vast majority of places people want to go will become navigable by self-driving cars, whether through the cars getting better or the roads becoming more easily navigable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Driverless cars are stuck in a jam</title><url>https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/10/10/driverless-cars-are-stuck-in-a-jam</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>theieindjri</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why so many otherwise smart people fell for FSD hype. I&amp;#x27;m not talking about the many con artists - I&amp;#x27;m talking about the tech-savvy people who genuinely bought into FSD hype.&lt;p&gt;How is it not obvious that FSD most likely requires artificial general intelligence and is, thus, probably somewhere between &amp;quot;many decades away&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;humans will never achieve it&amp;quot;?</text></item><item><author>crocal</author><text>The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average &amp;#x2F;better&amp;#x2F;. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or even rocket science.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>listenallyall</author><text>I agree and think a lot of smart people still don&amp;#x27;t really comprehend how non-linear the task is. In other words, they believe if a self-driving car handles itself properly in 95% of situations, the final 5% is right around the corner, when in fact the final 5% (often the difference between life and death) may, in all likelihood, take longer to get right than the previous 95%. It&amp;#x27;s just that much harder to be perfect than to be pretty good.</text></comment>