# Self-driving cars: approved only after the world ends

> …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.

Canonical URL: https://foom.hyperplex.org/p/selfdriving

Chapter: MIRI: Research

Category: economics & deployment

Predicted: 2021

Resolution date: 2025

Status: falsified by events

Status detail: The prediction was resolved as falsified by events in 2025

Original source label: takeoff debate with Paul Christiano, Nov 2021

## Resolution

Waymo runs paid driverless rides across five metros through ordinary regulation, built by a product team. World intact.

## 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.

Context: 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.

Source: [Takeoff Speeds debate (2021)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds)

> 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.

Context: The structural version: the world-ender arrives as a lab prototype far ahead of the market. The prototype-product gap collapsed instead.

Source: [Takeoff Speeds debate (2021)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds)

## Sources

- [Takeoff Speeds debate (2021)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds)