As AI advances, remember: We’re never as smart as we think we are, and we’re rarely as wise as we need to be...

Michie said:

So on a recent visit to our oldest son and his family, my wife and I drove around San Francisco in a Waymo AI taxi.

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Same here. All the young 'uns and their spouses and kids betook ourselves to Northern Cali for our last single niece's (from my wife's side, the full-on Koreans) wedding. She married a white geek boy which makes them a perfect match. With the poly-racial sho-nuf multi-cultural bunch in attendance, with people of varying percentages of White. Korean, French, Chinese, Japanese, Danish, Black, and Other ancestry, one more multi-ethnic couple was pretty much what we'd expect. Fortunately, everybody spoke English, although I did get some laughs from my attempts at Mandarin and Spanish, which I once deluded myself into thinking I was good at half a century or so ago. We flew into SFO from Nashville because the Danish mob had never been there and wanted to see it, so we hung out there for a couple of days. It was fun, and most of the horror stories that we'd heard about what the town had become turned out to be rubbish, I t looked like the nice pafts of town were still nice, the bad parts of town were still bad. Being half Asian I like the large numbers of Asians there, but also being Southern it still seems pretty weird around the edges to me as well.

Anyway, Dansk son-in-law and I both being geekazoids, we had to ride the Waygo taxis. The way the lidar stuff was set up was impressive, and it obvious worked. the cars navigated SF traffic with perfect grace, picking us where we stood and dropping us precisely where we said, with never a misstep. The app was perfectly intuitive (a welcome surprise!), and there never was heard a discouraging word about any or it. And it was cheaper than a human piloted cab. Full marks.

That's the good news. The bad news is that human drivers are now officially on the road to obsolescence. It'll be a few years yet, but computer-driven vehicles will become more and more prevalent as their proficiency increases (and it will), and the prices come down (and they will) individual human drivers are going to go the way of the dodo. Seriously, I'm 72 years old, and I don't know how long I'll still be able to drive safely. Buying a car that I can sit down in, tell where to go, and have it simply goes there sounds like a brilliant idea.