It's pretty clear that if a human can't even pay attention to a light directly pointed at them, we have a very long time to go before humans can safely drive cars without a computer to intervene when needed.
Of course, the road system is designed for humans' foibles, not computers' foibles, and computers will have to deal with that. But the bar is low.
Computers aren't really as consistent as you say, either. Obviously, a deterministic machine will produce the same outputs for the same inputs. But when your inputs are camera data from the real world, you'll never get the same input twice. For example, my car sometimes misreads or fails to read speed limit signs, but it'll usually read the exact same sign perfectly fine the next time I go past.
This is better for the environment, there is a lot of energy lost in a full stop for a stop sign that could be saved: less air pollution/CO2 to deal with.
I think you misread that article.
Someone built their own toy implementation of an CV sign recognizer. Then, with full access to the code, they reverse engineered visual distortions that could seem innocuous to humans but trip up their model.
It's not a real world issue as far as I'm aware (though obviously signs can be misread or missed, but not invisibly vandalized)
a) Humans can be fooled by vandalising a stop sign too. The difference here is that the change is imperceptible to humans... but does this matter?
b) A lot of self-driving work leans heavily on maps which will know to expect a stop sign.
That's what happens when the sign were made for humans. They should start putting QR codes under traffic signs, with the human sign as a fall back or as a second point of reference.
You wouldn't remove human sign identification from the algorithm, you just supplement it with the small QR code under the sign.
People can be dicks to each other in myriad ways, I don't find these arguments that you could trick self-driving cars super compelling.
This became painfully obvious with the article floating around where a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit sign. It's pretty clear that if a car is mistaking a red sign for a white sign, we have a very long time to go before the car can safely drive itself without a human observer to intervene when needed.
When it comes to automated driving, we need to keep our optimism in check and know that it can take decades before we have safe robotic taxis. They may become legal in countries with lower bars for safety before they are legal in the US.
The big problem, I think, will be when the drunks get into accidents because they will turn on autonomous driving, and don't get pulled over. Instead, they won't be sober enough to observe and intervene when the car screws up.