Credit: Visual China

"I think we’ll achieve full self-driving, maybe what you call four to five, I think  later this year," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said via video link on Thursday morning at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.

According to the Society of Automotive Engineers, there are six levels of driving automation from Level zero (fully manual) to Level five (fully autonomous).  L4 cars do not require human interaction in most circumstances. On level five, the system supplier or car company is responsible for any possible car accidents.

“In terms of where Tesla is at this stage, I think we are very close to achieving full self-driving  without human supervision,”Musk added.

The useful self-driving technology can free people from the boring driving and greatly increase the use of cars. He added that a vehicle is typically used between 10 and 20 hours a week, and if fully automated driving is achieved, the car's usage time could increase to 168 hours a week, or 24 hours a day, according to Musk.

He said Tesla is very interested in sharing and licensing its self-driving technology to other automakers.

This is not the first time Musk has made optimistic predictions about Tesla's self-driving system. In May, Musk said in a media interview that FSD (Full Self-Driving) would be Tesla's "ChatGPT moment", and that he expects FSD to be safer than a human driver in 2023 or 2024. As of March 2023, the FSD Beta has accumulated nearly 200 million miles of driving.

Musk noted that AI technology will have a profound impact on human civilization, and as robots are much more productive than humans, it brings humanity into a post-scarcity era, where everything is no longer scarce and people will be better off and have access to whatever they want.

According to Musk, robots are smart enough to handle boring and repetitive work or dangerous work that humans don't want to do. He believes that with the explosion of computing power, the gap of the arithmetic power between machines and humans is widening. As a result, human intelligence will account for a lower percentage of total intelligence compared to machine intelligence as time goes by, and the number of robots, which have stronger computing capacity, will exceed the number of humans on Earth.

Musk said that people have to be very careful to make sure that it ends up helping humans, expressing his own concerns about comprehensive artificial intelligence.

He mentioned that full AI is a completely different story compared to limited AI like autonomous driving. The former is generated by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of high-performance computers that are much smarter than what humans have done in any fields. He believes that this kind of superintelligence could have a very positive future, but could also trigger some negative effects that need to be regulated.

“I think, really, China is going to be great at anything it puts its mind into. That includes many different sectors – sectors of the economy, but also artificial intelligence,” Musk told the World AI Conference.