Full self-driving is underhyped?

https://www.slowboring.com/p/self-driving-cares-are-underhyped

This is a good piece. I think people generally are too pessimistic on self-driving cars. He's got a good discussion on how most of the barriers at this point are regulatory and social rather than technical (at least for limited deployment).

I think a lot of this has to do with how much Musk dominates the discourse. He made claims about Tesla self-driving that were not remotely realistic or accurate.

But while Tesla is behind on self-driving, other players like Waymo actually already have functional fully autonomous self-driving occurring in the real world.

"So it’s not a solved problem; we’re still talking about a world of hype and potential more than a reality. But the reality is that if you have a business meeting in Downtown Phoenix, you can take a driverless taxi to the airport when you wrap up. Not in the future. Not hypothetically. But right now. We’re looking primarily at questions of business models and economics, not technology. Driverless cars are on the road as we speak, and more are coming in the very near future."

I'm notably pessimistic on the current "AI" hype, but not here. It would be a shame if they get conflated in the popular consciousness when the inevitable AI winter happens in the coming years.

And he's got a great point that for certain use cases it is really natural. So you may not see them as a replacement for the personal car, but they could transform public transportation and are ideally suited for it. Which in turn could transform our relationship to the personal car and land development in general.

Likewise with delivery.