my friend bought a ride from a waymo for shits and giggles. i was actually intrigued about how the car made decisions on its own and sorta nerd sniped me to learn more about machine learning (not llms).
there’s probably some evil thing the self driving car companies are doing that im not aware of, but I was just interested in the ML aspect.
I feel like with most cases of post 2008 technology, what they’re doing is interesting on the surface level. The problem is that it’s always a wildly inefficient and predatory solution for whatever problem.
Self driving cars sound like a good idea, smoother traffic, safer roads, etc. The problem is the technology isn’t really there yet and the way it’s currently implemented is dangerous and inefficient and really has no place on actual roads. So what we end up with are waymos that are error prone and susceptible to harassment from people and teslas causing accidents. That harassment waymos get is somewhat justified too because of what they represent. Instead of billions of dollars being spent on public transit which would solve the same problems more efficiently, billions of dollars are spent on a personal, luxury, novelty transit experience.
As far as the ML goes, yeah it’s interesting I guess. It needs vastly more data than it has because driving is incredibly complicated. I don’t really have any basis for it, but I kinda don’t think it’ll ever be effective enough until we reach some kind of technology breakthrough with quantum computing or something. There’s too many data bottlenecks for the amount of data processing required. Until we get that, waymo is just gonna have to keep relying on underpaid Filipino support staff to fill in the gaps.