Current language models (misnomered as “AI”) are great at some things but fail at any real thinking.
Self-Driving works decently in predictable environments but anything outside of those limits can make it literally crash and burn.
Public road transportation by individuals just has too many cases where real decision-making is required.
Despite all their resources, I think they’ve given up. All the brilliant engineers and scientists have given up, because they know what we’ve suspected for a long time.
Yup. Self-driving cars will never truly be possible with unpredictable humans still driving the other cars on the road. Maybe if you could put a true AGI into a car.
We could have self-driving cars with today’s technology if the only other vehicles on the road were also self-driving and all interconnected via a mesh network with each other and the other critical road infrastructure like intersections.
But if on today’s roads if you want a truly Level 5 self-driving car where you get in the car in your driveway and say “take me to Burger King”, you’ll need an AGI in the car.
A train is so much easier if you don’t want to drive. But billionaires don’t want trains.
As much as I am a big fan, and user of public transportation, saying it’s just because billionaires don’t want trains is a bit disingenuous in my opinion. A car is simply much more convenient than public transportation. If I wanted to go to burger king from my house, right now, I could walk 5 minutes to the train station, jump on the train, take that for about 2 minutes to the next station, jump off and walk another 10 minutes to burger king. So like, 17-ish minutes. If I went there to get takeaway for both me and my wife her food would be cold before coming back, even if we live in a scenario where the trains match up perfectly as to avoid any waiting times at the station.
Lets call it a roundtrip of 35 minutes just to get a burger. Again, assuming that the trains, because they are so incredibly wellfunded in this scenario, that I can step on a train pretty much any time I need, instead of the hour it is at the moment.
If I were to take my car, the same distance would take me 5 minutes. So a roundtrip of 10 minutes.
When I take the train to work, I need to bring my bike along because trains don’t stop in front of the factory. Time from set off to arrival is about 45 minutes. In my car I can get there in 15 minutes. That’s 60 minutes of wasted time per day.
My point is, taking trains is not going to work for a whole lot of people, and brushing them and their needs off because of it isn’t going to solve anything.