[pbh101]

This is a big moving of the goalposts. The optimists were saying Level 5 would be purchasable everywhere by ~2018. They aren’t purchasable today, just hail-able. And there’s a lot of remote human intervention.

And San Francisco doesn’t get snow.

[intended]

Hell - SF doesn’t have motorcyclists or any vehicular traffic, driving on the wrong side of the road.

Or cows sharing the thoroughfares.

It should be obvious to all HNers that have lived or travelled to developing / global south regions - driving data is cultural data.

You may as well say that self driving will only happen in countries where the local norms and driving culture is suitable to the task.

A desperately anemic proposition compared to the science fiction ambition.

I’m quietly hoping I’m going to be proven wrong, but we’re better off building trains, than investing in level 5. It’s going to take a coordination architecture owned by a central government to overcome human behavior variance, and make full self driving a reality.

[wyclif]

I'm in the Philippines now, and that's how I know this is the correct take. Especially this part:

"Driving data is cultural data."

The optimists underestimate a lot of things about self-driving cars.

The biggest one may be that in developing and global south regions, civil engineering, design, and planning are far, far away from being up to snuff to a level where Level 5 is even a slim possibility. Here on the island I'm on, the roads, storm water drainage (if it exists at all) and quality of the built environment in general is very poor.

Also, a lot of otherwise smart people think that the increment between Level 4 and Level 5 is the same as that between all six levels, when the jump from Level 4 to Level 5 automation is the biggest one and the hardest to successfully accomplish.

[intended]

Level 5 is a pipe dream. Or if I’m being charitable it’s un-ambitious.

The goal for a working L5 should be “if piloting a rickshaw, will it be able to operate as a human owner in normal traffic.”

[schmidtleonard]

Yes, but they are getting good at chasing 9s in the US, those skills will translate directly to chasing 9s outside the US, and frankly the "first drafts" did quite a bit better than I'd have expected even six months ago

Guangzhou: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DWz1TD-VZg

Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN9nu-IkS1w

Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zg3jc90JTI

[intended]

I’m rejecting the assertion that the data covers a physics model - which would be invariant across nations.

I’m positing that the models encode cultural decision making norms- and using global south regions to highlight examples of cases that are commonplace but challenge the feasibility of full autonomous driving.

Imagine an auto rickshaw with full self driving.

If in your imagination, you can see a level 5 auto, jousting for position in Mumbai traffic - then you have an image which works.

It’s also well beyond what people expect fully autonomous driving entails.

At that point you are encoding cultural norms and expectations around rule/law enforcement.

[schmidtleonard]

You're not wrong on the "physics easy culture hard" call, just late. That was Andrej Karpathy's stated reason for betting on the Tesla approach over the Waymo approach back in 2017, because he identified that the limiting factor would be the collection of data on real-world driving interactions in diverse environments to allow learning theories-of-mind for all actors across all settings and cultures. Putting cameras on millions of cars in every corner of the world was the way to win that game -- simulations wouldn't cut it, "NPC behavior" would be their downfall.

This bet aged well: videos of FSD performing very well in wildly different settings -- crowded Guangzhou markets to French traffic circles to left-hand-drive countries -- seem to indicate that this approach is working. It's nailing interactions that it didn't learn from suburban America and that require inferring intent using complex contextual clues. It's not done until it's done, but the god of the gaps retreats ever further into the march of nines and you don't get credit for predicting something once it has already happened.

[intended]

Thanks, I appreciate your take. For what it’s worth, I made this point since the start of the FSD/l5/tesla launch.

I liked the use of the God of the gaps - an effective analogy for the counter position.

I’m rejecting the idea of the march of the 9s eventually getting to FSD - the cultural norms issue is about decision making not about physics.

Eg - You have to decide how aggressively to drive, overtake, or jockey for position.

My estimation is that this is not solvable by on board decision making, because that would be accepting unacceptable legal risk.