Stuart Russell

Yeah.

So in simulation, with perfect perception, you could actually show that you can drive safely for a long time, even if the other car is misbehaving and so on.

But...

Simultaneously, we worked on machine vision for detecting cars and tracking pedestrians and so on.

And we couldn't get the reliability of detection and tracking up to a high enough level, particularly in bad weather conditions, nighttime rain, fog.

The thing about driving is...

you know, so suppose you're a taxi driver, you know, and you drive every day, eight hours a day for 10 years, right?

That's a hundred million seconds of driving, you know, and any one of those seconds, you can make a fatal mistake.

So you're talking about eight nines of reliability, right?

Now, if your vision system only detects 98.3% of the vehicles, right?

Then

That's sort of, you know, one and a bit nines of reliability.

So you have another seven orders of magnitude to go.

And this is what people don't understand.

They think, oh, because I had a successful demo, I'm pretty much done.

But you're not even within seven orders of magnitude of being done.

And that's the difficulty.

And it's not the, can I follow a white line?

That's not the problem, right?

We follow a white line all the way across the country.