There are 6 categories of self driving, starting at 0. The final level is the one we've obviously been aiming at, and most were expecting. It's fully automated self driving in all conditions and scenarios. Get in your car anywhere, and go to anywhere - with capability comparable to a human. Level 4, by contrast, is full self driving under certain circumstances and generally in geofenced areas - basically trolleys without rails. Get in a car, so long as conditions are favorable, and go to a limited set of premapped locations.

And level 4 is where Waymo is, and is staying. Their strategy is to to use tiny geofenced areas with a massive amount of preprocessing, mapping out every single part of an area, not just in terms of roads but also every single meta indicator - sign, signals, cross walks, lanes, and so on. And it creates a highly competent, but also highly rigid system. If road conditions change in any meaningful way, the most likely outcome with this strategy is simply that the network gets turned off until the preprocessing can be carried and reuploaded again. That's completely viable in small geofenced areas, but doesn't generalize at all.

So the presence of Waymo doesn't say much of anything about the presence of level 5 autonomy. If anything it suggests Waymo believes that level 5 autonomy is simply out of reach, because the overwhelming majority of tech that they're researching and developing would have no role whatsoever in level 5 automation. Tesla is still pushing for L5 automation, but if they don't achieve this then they'll probably just end up getting left behind by companies that double down on L4. And this does indeed seem to be the most likely scenario for the foreseeable future.

Not necessarily. If self-driving cars "aren't ready" and then you redefine what ready is, you've absolutely got your thumb on the scale of measuring progress.

> "15 years ago self driving of any sort was pure fantasy, yet here we are."

This was 38 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntIczNQKfjQ - "NavLab 1 (1986) : Carnegie Mellon : Robotics Institute History of Self-Driving Cars; NavLab or Navigation Laboratory was the first self-driving car with people riding on board. It was very slow, but for 1986 computing power, it was revolutionary. NavLab continued to lay the groundwork for Carnegie Mellon University's expertise in the field of autonomous vehicles."

This was 30+ years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HbVWm7wdmE - "Short video about Ernst Dickmanns VaMoR and VaMP projects - fully autonomous vehicles, which travelled thousands of miles autonomously on public roads in 1980s."

This was 29 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAMVogK2TTk - "A South Korean professor [... Han Min-hong's] vehicle drove itself 300km (186 miles) all the way from Seoul to the southern port of Busan in 1995."

This was 19 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a6GrKqOxeU - "DARPA Grand Challenge - 2005 Driverless Car Competition"

It's okay! We'll just hook up 4o to the Waymo and get quippy messages like those in 4o's demo videos: "Oh, there's a tornado in front of you! Wow! Isn't nature exciting? Haha!"

As long as the Waymo can be fed with the details, we'll be good. ;)

Joking aside, I think there are some cases where moving the goalposts is the right approach: once the previous goalposts are hit, we should be pushing towards the new goalposts. Goalposts as advancement, not derision.

I suppose the intent of a message matters, but as people complain about "well it only does X now, it can't do Y" - probably true, but hey, let's get it to Y, then Z, then... who knows what. Challenge accepted, as the worn-out saying goes.