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U.S. to decide soon on GM's request to deploy cars without steering wheels
(www.autoblog.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I think that's a fairly common reaction, but it's important to remember what you're currently trusting your life to. Right now meat machines made for hunting and finding berries are operating giant death machines at speeds that they didn't evolve to understand, and sometimes that meat machine needs to constantly remind itself to pay attention and not shut down while driving, or to look for children, or to go the right speed, because driving isn't natural for meat machines. Not to mention that they take entire seconds to respond to stimulus (which can be hundreds of yards at speed), and they can only see in one direction at a time. And even if they do everything right, they can have a stroke at any time and kill everyone in their car and the car they hit.
Compare that to an actual machine, built to pay attention to everything in a full 360° at all times, never drives drunk or drowsy, and has double redundancy to prevent mechanical failure. They always drive at the right speeds, and react to problems within milliseconds.
Comparing humans to robots, it's honestly a testament to how chaotic driving is that robots didn't take it over a long time ago. But within our lifetimes I guarantee that we'll look at it the same way that we now look at chess. Humans may have been better at one point, but very soon computers will be so much better than us at driving that it's not even a competition. And it's fairly likely that they're already past that point, these GM cars already crash less than the average human driver
That is a very optimistic opinion, but I'm sure those GM cars truly are about as close to the fully autonomous vehicle that could fully replace a regular human driven car in its regular setting as ChatGPT is to AGI.
They already operate on the road without a driver behind the wheel at all, haven't they already "replace[d] a regular human driven car in its regular setting"?
I don't think so. This particular Cruise is a robo-taxi (source), not a fully-autonomous (level 5, or at least 4) personal vehicle. And other projects claiming level 4 seem to be more of a public transit thing.