I'm a little younger than Woz, and I am skeptical we'll have truly autonomous self-driving cars in my lifetime.
Three thoughts:
1. Any of us who work in software development know that "getting to 90% done is easy... it's the second 90% that gets you". And I believe that to the extent that we may seem to be 90% of the way to self-driving cars, it's definitely the "first 90%" not the second. The devil truly is in the details.
2. From what I've seen / heard, it seems that most of the testing done to date has been done in day-time, on limited access, smooth, flat, straight roads, OR urban surface streets where traffic speeds are relatively slow. I believe the leap from either of those environments to "any arbitrary twisty, curvy, back-country road, at night, when it's foggy and snowing", is quite substantial. And I don't consider a car truly autonomous unless it can handle those conditions at least as well as a human (to be fair, humans don't always handle those conditions well, so maybe this bar isn't as high as it seems).
3. I've developed software for 20 years... knowing how the sausage is made, seeing the compromises that are made in order to "hit the ship date", the bugs that are swept under the rug, the boundary conditions that are assumed away as "impossible", etc., I won't be trusting any self-driving car anytime soon.
Three thoughts:
1. Any of us who work in software development know that "getting to 90% done is easy... it's the second 90% that gets you". And I believe that to the extent that we may seem to be 90% of the way to self-driving cars, it's definitely the "first 90%" not the second. The devil truly is in the details.
2. From what I've seen / heard, it seems that most of the testing done to date has been done in day-time, on limited access, smooth, flat, straight roads, OR urban surface streets where traffic speeds are relatively slow. I believe the leap from either of those environments to "any arbitrary twisty, curvy, back-country road, at night, when it's foggy and snowing", is quite substantial. And I don't consider a car truly autonomous unless it can handle those conditions at least as well as a human (to be fair, humans don't always handle those conditions well, so maybe this bar isn't as high as it seems).
3. I've developed software for 20 years... knowing how the sausage is made, seeing the compromises that are made in order to "hit the ship date", the bugs that are swept under the rug, the boundary conditions that are assumed away as "impossible", etc., I won't be trusting any self-driving car anytime soon.