Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Self-driving car bets, published by paulfchristiano on July 29, 2023 on LessWrong.

This month I lost a bunch of bets.

Back in early 2016 I bet at even odds that self-driving ride sharing would be available in 10 US cities by July 2023. Then I made similar bets a dozen times because everyone disagreed with me.

The first deployment to potentially meet our bar was Phoenix in 2022. I think Waymo is close to offering public rides in SF, and there are a few more cities being tested, but it looks like it will be at least a couple of years before we get 10 cities even if everything goes well.

Back in 2016 it looked plausible to me that the technology would be ready in 7 years. People I talked to in tech, in academia, and in the self-driving car industry were very skeptical. After talking with them it felt to me like they were overconfident. So I was happy to bet at even odds as a test of the general principle that 7 years is a long time and people are unjustifiably confident in extrapolating from current limitations.

In April of 2016 I gave a 60% probability to 10 cities. The main point of making the bets was to stake out my position and maximize volume, I was obviously not trying to extract profit given that I was giving myself very little edge. In mid 2017 I said my probability was 50-60%, and by 2018 I was under 50%.

If 34-year-old Paul was looking at the same evidence that 26-year-old Paul had in 2016 I think I would have given it a 30-40% chance instead of a 60% chance. I had only 10-20 hours of information about the field, and while it's true that 7 years is a long time it's also true that things take longer than you'd think, 10 cities is a lot, and expert consensus really does reflect a lot of information about barriers that aren't easy to articulate clearly. 30% still would have made me more optimistic than a large majority of people I talked to, and so I still would have lost plenty of bets, but I would have made fewer bets and gotten better odds.

But I think 10% would have been about as unreasonable a prediction as 60%. The technology and regulation are mature enough to make deployment possible, so exactly when we get to 10 cities looks very contingent. If the technology was better then deployment would be significantly faster, and I think we should all have wide error bars about 7 years of tech progress. And the pandemic seems to have been a major setback for ride hailing. I'm not saying I got unlucky on any of these - my default guess is that the world we are in right now is the median - but all of these events are contingent enough that we should have had big error bars.

Lessons

People draw a lot of lessons from our collective experience with self-driving cars:

Some people claim that there was wild overoptimism, but this does not match up with my experience. Investors were optimistic enough to make a bet on a speculative technology, but it seems like most experts and people in tech thought the technology was pretty unlikely to be ready by 2023. Almost everyone I talked to thought 50% was too high, and the three people I talked to who actually worked on self-driving cars went further and said it seemed crazy. The evidence I see for attributing wild optimism seems to be valuations (which could be justified even by a modest probability of success), vague headlines (which make no attempt to communicate calibrated predictions), and Elon Musk saying things.

Relatedly, people sometimes treat self-driving as if it's an easy AI problem that should be solved many years before e.g. automated software engineering. But I think we really don't know. Perceiving and quickly reacting to the world is one of the tasks humans have evolved to be excellent at, and driving could easily be as hard (or harder) than being an engineer or scientist. This isn't some post hoc rationalization...