Prediction · economics & deployment
Self-driving cars: approved only after the world ends
Predicted in 2021 from takeoff debate with Paul Christiano, Nov 2021
“…the World-Ending Company will be able to use the same tech to build a true self-driving car, which would in the natural course of things be approved for sale a few years later after the world had ended.”
Resolution
falsified by events. The prediction was resolved as falsified by events in 2025.
Waymo runs paid driverless rides across five metros through
ordinary regulation, built by a product team. World intact.
Timeline
- Prediction made
- 2021
- Resolution date
- 2025
- Chapter
- Chapter 05: MIRI: Research
- Verdict
- falsified by events
Context and outcome
His 'concrete example' of the doom ordering: true self-driving arrives via the AGI company's tech and gets regulatory approval only after the world has already ended. Elsewhere in the thread he offers the resolution criterion himself: 'Once you can buy a self-driving car, the thing that Paul predicts with surety and that I shrug about has already happened.'
By 2025 Waymo was running paid, fully driverless robotaxi service across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta. It was approved through ordinary regulation, built by a non-AGI product team, and providing hundreds of thousands of rides a week. (Pedants' corner: a personal 'true self-driving car for sale' remains not quite purchasable; the ordering claim is dead either way.)
Supporting receipts
“what does it mean for "AI will be doing all of the AI R&D"? that sounds to me like something that happens after the end of the world, hence doesn't happen.”
The same filing system puts AI doing AI R&D in the after-the-end bucket. It is now the daily practice of every frontier lab.
“I furthermore rather expect that it will be a research project and a prototype, because the great gap between prototypes and commercializable technology will ensure that prototypes are much more advanced than whatever is currently commercializable.”
The structural version: the world-ender arrives as a lab prototype far ahead of the market. The prototype-product gap collapsed instead.