You Can Have Your Self-Driving Car in 2028
Waymo is (40 million) miles ahead of the competition, Mercedes is beating Tesla
It turns out that I’ve featured a Manifold prediction market in every AGI Friday post since the welcome post. So let’s canonize that as a Tradition and dive in with…
This week in predictions
Waymo (originally Google’s self-driving car) operates at level 4 autonomy, where no human is needed in the driver’s seat.1 If you live in San Francisco or LA or Phoenix or Austin (or, soon, Atlanta and Miami) you should absolutely try it. It’s pretty mind-blowing. Unambiguously superior to a human driver and in fact handles all manner of weird scenarios (like needing to move into the opposite lane of traffic to get around a double-parked car) with aplomb. But Waymo is only available as a robotaxi. When do we get this in private cars?
Somehow Tesla gets all the hype here but it turns out they’re not exactly on the cutting edge yet. Tesla is at level 2 autonomy: you have to monitor what it’s doing and be ready to seize control of your own accord if it’s about to kamikaze itself. If you’re consistently absorbed in a book while in the driver’s seat of a Tesla it’s pretty much a matter of time before it kills you.
(Tesla’s progress has been fast in recent months though, and it’s genuinely impressive how infrequently you need to intervene. Though you could argue that’s worse if it gives you a false sense of security.)
Level 3 autonomy means you can safely read a book, but not fall asleep. You have to be ready to immediately take manual control if the car is confused and beeps at you. Critically, you can trust the car to tell you that it needs you to take over. If for some reason you can’t, it will safely stop (though perhaps right in the middle of the freeway). My prediction is that Tesla won’t get to level 3 without lidar sensors, but we’ll see.
Currently at the cutting edge is probably Mercedes which is at level 3 autonomy on certain highways in California and Nevada when there's a traffic jam keeping the speeds below 40mph, with another car it can follow, in daylight in good weather with clear lane markings etc. It’s a start!
When can you have that for pretty much all roads at whatever the speed limit is? Manifold thinks maybe/probably by 2028, with a smallish but decent chance of next year already. I mean, it’s felt like it’s been a few years off since 2011 when Bethany and I first got to ride in a (what would become a) Waymo. But I’m willing to bet that this time it’s finally true!
This week in mundane utility
This is a bit older than a week but I’ll show off this calculator calculator that I got Codebuff to make for me. The backstory is that I wanted something to solve a math puzzle and ended up with something pretty elegant and general, I think. Basically it generates a handy calculator UI based on any equation. Examples:
An esoteric Sugar Calculator (from the above-mentioned math puzzle)
A Monitor DPI Calculator (HT David Yang)
This week in the news
Another banger from Christopher Moravec on vibe-coding.
A new post today from my favorite AI bull, Ege Erdil, and Matthew Barnett argues convincingly that we’ll see massive displacement of human jobs by AI before we see recursive self-improvement. One implication of that, if it’s true, is that there will be a huge shift in public perception of AI before we face any existential threats from AGI.