I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I, with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0.
And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.
I think of Tesla autopilot as sophisticated cruise control. Can perform most driving tasks better than I can, saves a lot of cognitive work, still needs close of my 100% attention.
Is this comment from 2010? Maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems you would be shocked by what modern cars are capable of.
The intention of my comment (possibly unclear) was to say: I know we can do self-driving very well very expensively. But what can we do extremely cheaply?
Like the difference between "what can do we with an LLM on my maxxed-out laptop with an RTX 5090 card" vs. "what can we do with a mac mini." Self-driving car version.