Humans are remarkably safe at driving
Since the article calls out Waymo engineers:<p>I&#x27;m a software engineer at Waymo, speaking for myself.<p>I agree with the premise of the article.  Humans are remarkably good at driving, and making a computer better will be hard.<p>Where I may disagree with the author is, I think the project is both feasible and worth doing.<p>It&#x27;s worth doing because we drive a remarkable amount.  Even at human safety level, more than a million people die every year in car crashes.<p>As far as feasibility, Waymo is, today, running a fully autonomous, no-human-behind-the-wheel ride hailing service in Arizona.  It&#x27;s not a dead-end demo, it&#x27;s there.  I know, a Phoenix suburb is not the same as NYC or Mumbai.  Trust me, I know -- probably better than you!  Nonetheless, what we accomplished was impossible a few years ago.<p>The history of AI is a history of moving the goalposts and then blowing past them.  AlphaGo solves what was considered one of the hardest problems in AI, but now that I see how you did it, eh, it&#x27;s not that impressive.  GPT-3 passes the Turing Test and can almost pass a coding phone screen, but come on, nobody <i>really</i> thought that a machine that passed TT would be intelligent.  It was just a few years ago that respectable people were saying we&#x27;d never solve protein folding.  Now that we have, the goalposts have moved again.  Don&#x27;t worry, we&#x27;ll blow past those, too.  Except this time people will yawn.<p>So give us some time.  This too will happen slowly, and then all at once.