[close04]

Today saying cars have "self driving capabilities" is like saying you're fluent in 3 words of a language. They have advanced driver assists but the insistence on the "self driving" terminology tricks enthusiasts and less tech savvy people alike into a false sense of confidence in the tech. Sometimes all the way to their deaths.

[jjn2009]

the majority of the miles I drive are highway so for me "3 words" covers a large percentage of my usage. This is likely true of most people as well.

[close04]

Indeed. The only way to call today's cars "self driving" is to narrow down the conditions of driving to the point where it's just as ridiculous as my "3 words" example, and then realize they're still not narrow enough.

> the majority of the miles

The "miles" metric that's not very relevant, not all miles are created equal. Driving in a straight line with almost zero challenges is nothing like driving as a whole. Would a power supply that's only able to take idle loads (majority of the time) be considered any good? How about a phone that can only make calls only most of the day?

Even a "dumb" car can be considered self driving by this definition. All you need is cruise control or if you want to get fancy, ACC and LKA. This would allow you to drive for hours on end or hundreds of Km on a highway with little (fractions of a second at a time, maybe a total of 1Km with hands on wheel) or no human intervention.

[Dylan16807]

> Would a power supply that's only able to take idle loads (majority of the time) be considered any good? How about a phone that can only make calls only most of the day?

When the models without those downsides require constant strong attention and nearly unbroken eyesight? Yes, sell me those models now. I'll switch between manual mode and somewhat-limited-feature mode when necessary.

[close04]

You may have missed the point and there’s not much room to dumb it down. If you have to narrow the definition of driving so much then it’s not actually driving.

Many cars spend a lot of time idling, especially in crowded cities. Would you call them self driving because they can perform unattended this very, very narrow task (but long) from the whole activity of driving?

As for the “yes sign me up” I call bluff. There are plenty of situations in daily life where you need to have constant supervision. You wouldn’t let your child operate in them under the assumption that “there’s a good chance they won’t die”. You will take the constant supervision in place of the device that only works for 1% of the features you need and even then it might kill.

Take an iron that can iron by itself but only small, cotton clothes, and once in a while it burns down the house. Do you leave it unattended? Do you even call it self ironing?

[Dylan16807]

> If you have to narrow the definition of driving so much then it’s not actually driving.

I don't care what you call it. I just want to be able to ignore the road until the car beeps at me. (with at least 10 seconds of warning)

> Many cars spend a lot of time idling

But a car can't be idling while I use it. A computer can have idle power levels while I browse the web, and a phone that works in a certain range of hours is still very useful. If you wanted to make an analogy for "useless", that didn't come across.

> You wouldn’t let your child operate in them under the assumption that “there’s a good chance they won’t die”.

> once in a while it burns down the house

Who said anything about 'a good chance'? You said those products worked for specific uses. You didn't say they would also fail at random, even inside those limits. This is a different scenario now.

If the car can handle "a straight line with almost zero challenges", sign me up for that easy highway driving. It's only when you remove the word 'almost' that it becomes a cruise control missile / deathtrap.

[close04]

Self driving systems today are the nurse but you're still the doctor. And you wouldn't call the nurse a doctor just because they can do the more simple or common tasks.

> I just want to be able to ignore the road until the car beeps at me. (with at least 10 seconds of warning)

You may want it but you are not getting that from any "self driving" system in use now. It's even illegal for you to do so. And that isn't self driving anyway, it's driver assists like ACC and LKA assisting you in very particular conditions as long as you're still in control and alert.

> But a car can't be idling while I use it.

If you're in traffic and the car isn't moving it's idling. In a traffic jam you may even idle more than you move, and many highways and crowded cities give you exactly that.

> You didn't say they would also fail at random

It was an analogy to self driving cars killing people even with those very narrow specific uses so I didn't think I had to spell it out. That was my whole point. Consider it spelled out now.

> If the car can handle "a straight line with almost zero challenges" [...] It's only when you remove the word 'almost' that it becomes a cruise control missile / deathtrap

If a system left to its own devices turns a degraded lane marker into a major life threatening challenge then it just makes my point that you're the driver and it can only assist.

To be a driver you are tested in all kinds of conditions. But you consider a car to be "a driver" because it can drive a straight line most of the times?

Self driving cars today are Silicon Valley's "not hotdog" app. That was meant as a joke but it fits the current situation of self driving to a T. Great if your needs are ultra specific relative to the whole spectrum of the task at hand and you're willing to take the risk of getting killed in the process.

For a narrow enough set of conditions you can define anything almost any way you want and be correct.

[Piskvorrr]

That's a great analogy! For English (and autonomy levels), this works for orders of magnitude: Two and two and two and two and two, no good; ten times ten, good in easy things; with a thousand words, you can get things done and sound normal; a vocabulary of ten thousand words provides an adequate command of the language to discuss complex concepts; 10^5 or any higher exponent comprises capability exceeding that of a majority of users.

I do agree that we're still at level 2: it's relatively amazing (i.e. see what can be done with the limited toolset available), but not really that great: outside of predictable, menial tasks, the rough edges become acutely limiting.

[ghaff]

Except nothing existing today is fully autonomous (i.e. I can kick back and read a book) even on just highways.