I always find it odd that hacker news has such pessimism on technology advancements. It might not work now but give it another 5 to 10 years this may very well become reality. The pace of advancement in ML/AI is incredible.
Ill bet right now that level 5 self driving will never come. Whatever the pace of technological advancement.
If it can work, then a Tesla trained in SF would work on streets in India or Vietnam. But it cant, since driving data is cultural data and self driving narratives lie in a cultural blind spot.
Advanced economies have relative more stable traffic and rule of law which influences their driving.
If those disappear, old driving data is not going to apply.
When you look at history and tech there is only seemingly on way: progress. The thing is, it's not the case, and before you can deem something to be progress or not it usually is way too late (gas, asbestos, lead in gas, lead in paint, freon in fridges).
So what makes you dream now might be completely detrimental in the future. Not everyone thinks autonomous personal cars are a step forward, I personally think it's a step in the wrong direction.
Everybody asks "how" but nobody ask "why". "It's just progress why don't you like it?!"
Maybe... but probably not. Care to set up a $10 wager for 10 years from now for agreed-on terms about self driving?
I'm pretty pessimistic and jaded about computer technology. I've been in the field too long, and done too much computer security.
(1) Whatever guarantees you think the hardware is supposed to be making, it isn't. The hardware is now complex enough that just about any security boundary can be violated with enough creativity, if you have enough fancy features to try and keep performance marching forward if you've hit a process wall. Rowhammer. Intel's... everything. The various branch predictor things. Etc.
(2) Modern software, as a general rule, is dependency hell. You suck in hundreds of megabytes of code from God knows who, all of which is sucking in yet more, to do something. Nobody has any idea about all the code their project is sucking in, unless they've written it themselves. So, by that definition, nobody can actually understand their code, because some corner case, 15 layers down, can break something in absolutely unexpected and obscure ways.
(3) Murphy is an ass, and that corner case will happen, when you least expect it and are least able to debug it.
(4) Those piles of complexity, on top of piles of complexity, stacked on top of the previous complexity that exists to solve problems caused by the previous complexity, which was created to get around performance problems due to... etc, just go all the way down. It's all technical debt, and it leads to diminishing returns on investment, or, as I'm beginning to think, negative returns on investment. The more we try, the worse we make things. I'll point to Apple here, and the fact that despite the fact that they know messaging is the literal worst case for untrusted remote input, and that they've built explicit systems to sandbox it, firewall it, safely parse it, etc... it's still been, very recently, vulnerable to remote, zero-click, zero-user-awareness remote exploits that give the remote attacker root level privileges on the phone to do whatever they want and exfil whatever they want. Yay.
(5) The "culture" around modern software development is absolutely terrifying when it comes to anything safety critical. Fine, ship whatever when it comes to the latest addictive social media app, and it if crashes, welp. But when it comes to things in the physical world, that's absolutely not acceptable. When Tesla OTA'd updates to the brake firmware of CR's Model 3 that utterly sucked in the braking tests and it got better, everyone was so excited about how, see, OTAs can fix issues! Very few people asked how on earth Tesla had shipped defective braking firmware in the first place, if it was a quick fix. Personally, I'd like my brake system firmware well tested before release, and absolutely "hard" in ROM, so that it can't be updated. Look at the papers from a while back where the security people were able to remotely compromise a Jeep's braking system through remote cellular connectivity and the radio. That's just not OK in the slightest!
(6) As Tesla continues to demonstrate, the current way that ML/AI is done is absolutely rubbish for any sort of safety critical system, which automotive control systems are. "Lol, whoops, yeah... hey, thanks for reporting that your car can't take that turn that it used to take just fine!" is the sort of stuff that's funny, until it's tragic. Tesla's software practices are very clearly unsuited to anything remotely resembling the sort of safety critical systems they think they're developing.
That's all before you get into the physical limits we're approaching, the economic cost of modern fabs, and the fact that something like 40% of the world's high end silicon production is in a country that China very much appears to be planning to take back.
There's an awful lot of money chasing the hope, but I'm (obviously) very skeptical that much of anything useful will come out of it, other than making a bunch of people rich in the process of saying "Well, we're still 3-5 years out on this technology and I intend to retire before you can really call me out on the fact that in 3-5 years, it's still going to be 3-5 years out."
I work in the low level weeds, and I see what an utter disaster modern tech is. I'm increasingly using less and less of the stuff in my personal life, and my life is better for it.
If it can work, then a Tesla trained in SF would work on streets in India or Vietnam. But it cant, since driving data is cultural data and self driving narratives lie in a cultural blind spot.
Advanced economies have relative more stable traffic and rule of law which influences their driving.
If those disappear, old driving data is not going to apply.