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I remember back in 2016 I was sitting on my cousin's deck for one of his kid's first birthday parties, and my uncle posed a question to the group of whether the kid in question would ever get a driver's license. Now, he has a habit of going out on certain limbs when arguing, but he seemed utterly convinced that fifteen years hence autonomous vehicles would be so ubiquitous as to obviate the need for any driver training among normal people. I argued against the idea, but only to the extent that the regulatory landscape wouldn't change that fast—I certainly thought the technology would be there, but I doubted that regulators and insurance companies would have the stomach to turn all operations over to computers. OF course, that was around the time where everyone was talking about AVs. A guy near me trying to win the Democratic nomination for state rep was basing his entire campaign on handling the disruption that would soon wreak havoc on the trucking industry. I saw Uber's AVs on an almost daily basis near my office in Pittsburgh. CGP Grey was making videos about how full autonomy would basically solve traffic congestion, at least as long as you don't give a fuck about pedestrians.
This summer, that kid will be halfway toward qualifying for a learner's permit, and autonomous vehicles seem further away now than they did when he was one. Less than two years after that party, a woman in Arizona was killed after being hit by an Uber self-driving car. From the evidence available, it didn't look to me like the accident was avoidable, and had it involved a standard car it would have made the local news for a couple days but probably wouldn't have even resulted in charges being filed. But since it was an AV the story went national, and the public's trust had eroded. It would be easy to blame this incident for the downfall of enthusiasm over EVs, but let's face it; something like this happening was only a matter of time, and the public response was entirely predictable. So the industry plugged along, and keeps plugging along, though fewer and fewer people seem to care. Uber's out, Ford's out, Volkswagen's out, GM is under investigation, Apple seems directionless and indifferent, and a recent Washington Post article claims that Tesla cut quite a few corners in its pursuit of offering its customers something that could be marketed as progress.
Hype for AVs started picking up in earnest among the tech horny around 2012. Three years later the buzz was mainstream. All throughout this period various industry leaders kept making bold predictions about truly autonomous products being only a few years away. Okay, maybe with some caveats, like only on the highway, or in geofenced areas, or whatever, but still, you'd at least be able to get something that had some degree of real autonomy. The enthusiasm seemed justified, though, since, practically overnight, self-driving cars went from something that you'd occasionally hear about in science magazines when some university was doing basic research to something that major tech and auto companies were sinking billions of dollars into. Around the same time, regular cars started getting features like adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist that seemed like self-driving under another name, and Tesla's autopilot feature seemed like a huge leap. With the normal acceleration of technology plus the loads of money that were being dumped into any number of competing companies, it was only a matter of time. Now, ten years and 100 billion dollars later, the only products that are available to an average consumer are a few unreliable ridesharing services in cities that don't have weather.
I'm bringing this up because there are a lot of parallels between AVs and GPT-4. This is a huge, disruptive technology that relies on AI, and, while it may have some critical flaws in its current implementation, technology is constantly improving, often exponentially, as processing power increases. And while I don't have access to GPT-4 myself, I'm sure it's as impressive as everyone claims it is. The trouble is, impressing people with no skin in the game is easy. Convincing people to rely on it is a whole different animal. Most people found AVs pretty impressive when they first came out. But being impressive doesn't cut it when you're looking to replace human drivers; you actually have to be better than human drivers, or at least as good as human drivers. And human drivers are pretty damn good. In 2021 there were around 5.2 million reportable accidents in nearly 3 trillion miles driven (in PA an accident is reportable if one of the cars is inoperable or there is injury or death, though other states may vary). This means that, in any given mile of driving, one's chances of getting into an accident more serious than a fender bender is .000181%. If you drive 15,000 miles a year, you'll get into an accident about once every 30 years. If Elon Musk or whoever announced that they had developed a system that avoided accidents 99.9% of the time, that would sound impressive. But it wouldn't be; at that rate, the average driver would be getting into about 15 crashes per year! Even if it were 99.99% of the time you'd still be getting into more than a crash a year, 3 in a 2 year period. Imagine what your insurance rates would be like if you got into a crash a year.
And that doesn't even take into account all the miscellaneous bullshit that AVs do that doesn't cause accidents but nonetheless makes them untenable. They have trouble with unprotected left turns (aka most left turns), and they'll take circuitous routes to avoid them. They don't like construction, even minor construction like a lane being blocked off with cones. They get confused when, say, a landscaper has mulch bags hanging into the street a little bit. Or when driving down a narrow street with cars parked on both sides. And when this happens they just stop and call home. The people who use these ride sharing services are then forced to wait while a tech shows up to deal with the problem, traffic being disrupted in the meantime. And I won't even mention inclement weather. Making something look impressive during early testing is easy, but convincing someone to rely on it when safety, or money, or anything else that actually matters is at stake is a much harder sell, as the accuracy has to be pretty damn near close to 100% before anyone will actually trust it. And if AVs are any indication, it's really hard to get to 100%. Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if AI right now is at about the same stage AVs were in 2016. Impressive, but far from ready for prime time. Everyone keeps saying that the next iteration is going to be a game changer, and everyone is increasingly impressed, but not impressed enough to trust their business to it. And eventually it gets to the point where research is so expensive and the returns are so little that no one in their right mind would invest in it, and smaller firms go bust while larger ones scale back considerably, or at least try to direct their AI research towards applications where it might actually be used commercially. Then we're all sitting here in 2030 asking ourselves what happened to the AI revolution that seemed right around the corner. I could be wrong, but if that's the case, then hey, we should at least have some operable self-driving cars.
It seems like China or some other country with less stringent safety standards and a strong desire to outcompete richer countries will be chomping at the bit to adopt autonomous vehicles and other emergent technologies. The US and our allies are too cautious to dip our foot in the water, making us vulnerable. Then again the cost of labor is so much lower in poorer countries that they have less incentive to adopt them, so I don't know.
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