my friend bought a ride from a waymo for shits and giggles. i was actually intrigued about how the car made decisions on its own and sorta nerd sniped me to learn more about machine learning (not llms).
there’s probably some evil thing the self driving car companies are doing that im not aware of, but I was just interested in the ML aspect.
I think that advocates are right in that, once the kinks are worked out, they will be far safer than human drivers.
At the same time, I think the implications lead to a lot of dystopian implications for cities. Like, a properly tuned self driving car will never hit a pedestrian. So pedestrians in cities will learn they can safely step out into the street even in oncoming traffic. But this will cause the car to swerve and slam to a halt, which us a bad UX for the passenger. Enter: automatically reported jaywalking offenses powered by car cameras and facial recognition technology.