Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those &quot;fake it til you make it&quot; startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people.<p>This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That&#x27;s how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving. Doesn&#x27;t work. Machine learning is way too dumb.<p>You can maybe identify &quot;traffic light&quot;, &quot;car&quot;, &quot;pedestrian&quot;, and &quot;deer&quot; with machine learning. That&#x27;s just used to guess what they&#x27;re going to do next. It&#x27;s not used to decide if they&#x27;re an obstacle. Obstacle detection and avoidance is all sensors and geometry.<p>Also, &quot;self driving car&quot;, &quot;electric car&quot;, and &quot;transportation as a service&quot; are all independent.  All will be available, but not from the same companies.