Waymo has a partnership with Lyft that may or may not go anywhere. Waymo may decide that they don't need no stinking rideshare company to host their vehicles.
Did think Waymo more interested in the Android model versus the iPhone model.
Now Google called them on it their hands are tied as can't do on their own.
I suspect Google will work with them as Google wants the Android model and NOT the iPhone model.
Google wants to be the standard for everyone.
Given how many billions are being currently spent on self driving, there's going to be a lot of dissapointed investors if they've just been sold snake oil, and anything decades out absolutely is snake oil in the corporate world.
As we begin adopting automated driving, there comes a point where it's helpful to have the systems communicating intentions with each other; part of the issue with driving manually is the uncertainty over other drivers' intent. Using automation and letting drivers talk in this manner would likely reduce crashes down to manual driver fault and significant bugs or sensor errors as it's adopted more. This isn't what they're after at the moment, but encouraging collaboration in this space could make that an easier path moving forward.
Not to mention, a single accepted protocol with higher adoption could allow a single car to gain much more valuable data beyond what's in their immediate vicinity, but could tell them what's going on nearby and even real-time traffic data along the route.
As for now, imagine the years of experience each technology has being combined into one super-driver. I know it's not that simple - each company may be representing the data differently - but I don't expect that to be an issue that couldn't resolve itself. Couldn't this significantly push this tech forward? (Note: I don't have the answer, this is my suspicion. I'm hoping some discussion could highlight situations where this has had a bad result, if any).
Verbing and nouning weirds language.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
Don't miss the comment pointing out the word "denominative:"
Hell yes. A lot of hype has been sold at a dear price, driven in no small part by Uber’s desperation to find a profitable business model through automation. The reality is that critical edge cases are hard, and no one seems to know how to fix them. Two factors that I believe will dictate “decades away” or as you rightly say, someday, but not today, probably a loooong time from now. First, these crashes are not going to stop as long as SDVs are on public roads, and that includes the bad joke that is Tesla AP. That kind of thing is just too juicy for the media not to latch on to, and too scary to the average person to ignore. As a thought experiment, imagine if Uber has mowed down a well-off white kid instead of someone they could dismiss as a “formerly homeless woman.”
Second, the tech itself is hard and may be on shaky ground to begin with. The assumption that with enough training AI can adapt to the point of “better than human” is yet to be borne out in reality. And yet, the billions have already been invested, so a lot of people have a lot on the line to make some kind of MVP. So “millions of miles driven” gets bandied about, but it’s not miles in torrential rain, or terrible roads, or snow and ice. Who cares how many miles Waymo can drive on a sunny day in California? Get back to me when they can do the same on a back road in Maine, in the winter.
IMO this creates a feedback loop of hype and investment until the bottom drops out. Then it won’t just be a technological problem, but political, legal, and shrouded in “winter” as investors once burned will be reluctant to wade in again. To the people who see the billions invested as evidence of promise in and of itself, I say Theranos... Juicero...
In the case of the auto manufacturers, subsets of autonomous driving are interesting. If a car can truly be hands and eyes-off on highways (and the tech for that is fairly close), that's a product that almost sells itself.
I'm much more skeptical about driverless cars doing arbitrary pickups and dropoffs. I do think that anyone who is investing on the assumption that an Uber will be able to offer that in a few years is going to be disappointed. It will happen but not quickly with a few caveats like maybe fixed locations can be established to simplify the problem.
The absolute worst case scenario, within a couple years, is that you have limited deployment in favorable conditions, with fail-safes and human operators ready to take over remotely.