Yeah, there’s a lot of similarity with other human-level cognitive domains. We seem to be in the center of a logistic curve—massive very recent progress, but an unknown and likely large amount of not-yet-solved quality, reliability, and edge-case-safe requirements.
20 years ago, it was pure science fiction. 10 years ago it was “just an engineering problem, but a big one”, 5 years ago it was “need to fine-tune and deal with regulation”. Now it’s … “we can’t say we were wrong, and we’ve improved massively AGAIN, but it feels like the end-state is still out of reach”.
For a lot of applications, FSD IS ALREADY safer than human drivers. But it’s not as resilient and flexible, and it’s much worse than human in very rare situations, like person stuck under wheels in sensor-free location. The goalpost remains rather undefined, and I suspect it’s quite a ways out yet.
I do put some probability into a discontinuity—some breakthrough or change in pattern that near-instantaneously makes it so much obviously better than a human in all relevant ways that it’s just no longer a question. It’s, of course, impossible to put a timeline on that. I’d probably guess another 8-20 years on the current path, could be as fast as 2026 if something major changes.
Note that this is only slightly different from my AGI estimates—I’d say 15-40 years on current path (or as early as 5 if something big changes) for significant amounts of human functioning is no longer economically or socially desired—the shift from AI as assistants and automation to AI as autonomous full-stack organizations.
This similarity makes me suspicious that I’m just using cached heuristics, but also may be just that they’re similar kinds of tasks in terms of generality and breadth of execution.
Yeah, there’s a lot of similarity with other human-level cognitive domains. We seem to be in the center of a logistic curve—massive very recent progress, but an unknown and likely large amount of not-yet-solved quality, reliability, and edge-case-safe requirements.
20 years ago, it was pure science fiction. 10 years ago it was “just an engineering problem, but a big one”, 5 years ago it was “need to fine-tune and deal with regulation”. Now it’s … “we can’t say we were wrong, and we’ve improved massively AGAIN, but it feels like the end-state is still out of reach”.
For a lot of applications, FSD IS ALREADY safer than human drivers. But it’s not as resilient and flexible, and it’s much worse than human in very rare situations, like person stuck under wheels in sensor-free location. The goalpost remains rather undefined, and I suspect it’s quite a ways out yet.
I do put some probability into a discontinuity—some breakthrough or change in pattern that near-instantaneously makes it so much obviously better than a human in all relevant ways that it’s just no longer a question. It’s, of course, impossible to put a timeline on that. I’d probably guess another 8-20 years on the current path, could be as fast as 2026 if something major changes.
Note that this is only slightly different from my AGI estimates—I’d say 15-40 years on current path (or as early as 5 if something big changes) for significant amounts of human functioning is no longer economically or socially desired—the shift from AI as assistants and automation to AI as autonomous full-stack organizations.
This similarity makes me suspicious that I’m just using cached heuristics, but also may be just that they’re similar kinds of tasks in terms of generality and breadth of execution.