But we still have no self driving cars. Seems like the automation came by in the opposite direction. Perhaps driving will actually be the final thing automated.
While I agree with your statement overall, as someone who drives everyday in LA alongside Waymos without anyone inside of them I must disagree with this aspect of it.
Edit: nevermind. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/waymo-toronto-winter-self-d...
Because if it became fashionable for pedestrians to wear large green dresses with red balls, and everybody would wear that, we have no idea what the AI would do.
A truck or a car that has a 99% success rate would be the top threat to society and quickly rise to the leading cause of death under 30 if widely deployed.
You have to look at the benefit of something when balancing against a cost.
Wait, aren't human-driven cars already the leading cause of death under 30?
I agree that LLMs have and will continue to increase the number of activities that people can DIY. But I believe many people will still choose to pay for others to do things on their behalf.
This is beside the point of the analogy though.
99% successful web development where the 1% missing is security that and the company leaks its entire repository of user data every few months is not good.
99% successful car driving where 99% of 5-year periods have zero accidents per car is an order of magnitude safer than the average driver. (And gut feeling, I suspect approaching the tail-end of the safest drivers on the road.)
It feels like it's happening every Thursday and nobody cares. They just give people credit watch coupons or what's it called, and move on with their business. Worst case, a few pennies in fines.
But if CVS leaks your purchases on a weekly basis, it's probably going to affect people's willingness to shop there. (Or at least to use non-cash.)
It was too easy to assume that an AI would never approach human intelligence and hence would only be used for “boring” jobs like driving.
I’ve long disliked the hype around AI but now see that human intelligence is perhaps slightly overrated, at least in terms of the loftier positions seemingly requiring such.
Claude Opus puts to shame any highly caffeinated “10x” software developer. Not saying it’s perfect, but damn good. It can knock out difficult code analysis/reverse engineering more than 20-40x faster than I can. There was even a time long before AI when people thought the same of me…
Hell, at this point, I’d rather deal with Claude than a low-cost offshore team that puts up crappy implementations with endless go-backs and rewrites. I say this from actual experience, not xenophobia. There likely are some high performing offshore teams, I just wasn’t lucky to have the chance of working with one. Have had a couple of local colleagues that were worse… Claude’s probably much cheaper too.
Unfortunately, the “knowledge worker” jobs historically tended to be higher paid.
On one hand, AI is a major asset to experienced professionals with access.
On the other hand, it robs junior engineers hard-fought experience - much like watching a movie instead of reading the book.
And longer term, I think the entire economic structure of society is going to change. Doctors, lawyers, software developers, engineers — none of these are safe from AI reducing the need for headcount.
Which role is that, and why you think so ?
On other hand, in a completely fair market, i think AI can make profit. A lot of traders just stay at home and monitor news.
Intellectual pursuits are, by comparison, relatively new. Part of the reason they might seem so impressive to us is simply because we can't rely as much on eons of biological evolution, so even though what we are doing most of the time is really simple it seems "smart and sophisticated" compared to the far more complex mental operations that we are lucky are just automatic.
Think about it, you have an entire complicated as hell biological interior system that your brain manages continuously without so much as a conscious thought.
This is also why this hubris around the idea that LLMs rival human intelligence is quite laughable. If anything one of the major reasons they are so "great" is because they don't have to deal with a host of issues themselves (their computation is not responsible for keeping their bodies alive and hearts beating 24/7, data center ops takes care of that, unlike our computational system which, in addition to solving all these intellectual problems, also needs to regulate the body continuously)
Developers are guilty of hubris and they are getting slapped back to reality.
Something I'm noticing a lot is that automation finds easy footholds in unregulated industries because there's no basis to push back on it. And there's a lot more tolerance for poor quality work in unregulated industries too.
There is more than one way to skin a cat.
Do you live under a rock?
The same isn't true for elephants.
In 2025 it was occasionally driving weird. Today it's a much better driver than me.
That just makes you less prepared when you do have to take over. That's the danger of almost-perfect self driving.
In the case of Tesla, daring to call such a system "Autopilot" is a breathtaking level of irresponsibility. You are responsible for the vehicle you are driving, practically, morally and legally, even if a companies' marketing and the system itself does its very best to divest you from that simple and obvious truth.
Pilots still are required to be able to take over immediately for an autopilot system and are responsible and accountable for all those items you list and more.
Calling it autopilot is precisely what it is, calling it self driving would be false marketing.
We are talking about cars, not planes. Driven by regular people, not pilots.
It's a term chosen specifically to evoke a certain connotation among the majority of people, and you know it.
Autonomous driving is something entirely different in my mind. That would be a car good enough to work without driver controls or a remote operator. Nothing on the market meets this definition today.
Most people expect other things from something marketed as flying, but specialists know that this is exactly how most things fly. And lawyers know to read the fine print.
/s and argumentum ad absurdum, sorry for eristic tricks.
Hasn't been my experience for the past year or so, give it a try sometime. Incredibly relaxing and frees up my mind to focus on potential hazards further than just one car length in front of me. Sometimes (don't hate me) frees up my hands/eyes to handle other things that need some temporary attention. Traffic jams, getting cut off by impatient drivers, being stuck behind slow drivers, none of it bothers me. I'm chilling out and talking to my kids and enjoying the scenery.
The current FSD system has no relation to the old Autopilot, is enormously better, and very pleasant to use. A year ago FSD was nice, but I had to take over occasionally. This year it's much better, and I've yet to see a weakness, aside from some parking issues.
It's definitely a better driver than me!
All past inventions have put some of the most miserable humans out of a job. Farming by hand is hard, so is copying books and don't even get me started on the dullness of making clothes by hand.
Driving all day isn't all that far off, though still much better than the above and definitely better than riding horses all day.
Telegraph operators? Hell no. Dude sitting in an elevator all day? No thanks.
It's always been from the other end. This time around, there's gonna be some 10-20 years of robot manufacturing, then a universal lifetime of robots fighting misaligned robots until enough paperclips have been manufactured.
Or you know, we block out the sun and live in caves or whatever you fancy.