this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Whoa, AOL. That’s a flashback, though the site is pretty good all things considered.
…But yeah, even Musk’s lies aside, this is an extremely difficult problem.
Musk and not only him are not framing it like that. I was led to believe we are very close to achieving that. And it's not just that I'm gullible, it's mostly because the standards these systems have to live up to are unreasonable. We only need software that will do it more reliably that humans as far as I'm concerned, that's my benchmark. But it seems we are not there at all.
But ok, I'm not taking about taxis, but just general full self driving , taxis alone I think that's bs. What you need is better public transport and the taxi part of transport can be more niche/expensive. Taxis by themselves can't solve anything, but I guess that's another discussion.
Self driving has to be better than human because their failure modes are “weird” and unexpected to other (human) drivers.
If I’m on the road, I know what a drunk driver looks like, or someone who looks like they won’t see me changing lanes. What I'm not expecting is, say, a sudden, stable, controlled veer into oncoming traffic, a slow red light runner well after it changed, a hard turn across the road from a full stop it clearly can’t make and so on. FSDs aren’t human; their mistakes aren’t easily predictable by humans (or other FSDs trained on human traffic), hence they’ll have nasty, headline grabbing, lawsuit grabbing accidents even if their error rate is 1/4 of an ultra healthy 30 year old.
…And that is assuming perfect conditions.
Humans handle bad environments extremely well, FSD taxis are obsessively maintained (which is not sustainable with widespread FSD), and the problems in rain, dust, construction, weird obstructions or whatever are compounded without “superhuman” sensing like Waymo's LIDAR.
Hence, I completely disagree. This engineering problem is intractable.
I think the solution is:
Mesh networked cars, so they can “see” each other, pool their perspective sensor data, send warnings and such. They don’t all have to be FSD, human driven cars can still communicate.
A critical mass of these, enough to matter.
“Defensive driving” against FSD cars taught in driving school.
Along with expected hardware/model architecture advances.
And we are both awhile away from that, and headed in the wrong direction (since companies like Tesla generally aren’t interested in cooperation, but monopolization).
I think one of the issues is that what you are describing is getting over the line between the idea of a car that represents total personal freedom and communist public transport.
It doesn’t have to be about that. Cars could share data via common protocol, like all sorts of industries do, and that has little to do with ownership.