[Fricken]

I have faith in robotaxis abilities to handle safety critical things. The lizard brain stuff is under control. They are still just too stupid to navigate complex traffic efficiently, without regularly hesitating and getting tripped up.

Robotaxis are Rube Goldberg machines, there are so many moving parts. The running joke at Waymo for a while was "How many engineers does it take to operate a self driving car?"

Everybody was convinced deep learning would give us all the magically brilliant AI we needed to make this work. With perception and classification problems the robotics industry was able to go from "impossibru" to "holy shit it works" over the space of a couple years, it was really exciting. In hindsight it's easy to see that the exciting and game changing breakthroughs were in fact a long time coming, and that the real rate of progress in open world robotics is in fact excrutiatingly slow and bespoke. Nobody has an ace up their sleeve.

[travisporter]

Can you elaborate on the moving parts? Is it just too expensive to install/maintain the sensors, or do you mean the algorithm has to deal with multiple inputs/decisions?

I could envision a scenario where a city council of a less populated city with lax regulations could deploy robotaxis to their economic advantage. Do you think we'll get there soon?

[a_t48]

Not OP, but it's as much the algorithm having to deal with different inputs as the engineers having to build all the needed systems together.