Which kind of amazes me that it wasn't obvious. When I start to think of vision recognition issues, poor conditions, missing signs, markings, etc., unpredictable human drivers... then all of the edge cases I alone have seen in 30 years of driving... I would definitely have put the problem on the very edge of what might be solvable. And that's today, not 10 years ago. What amazes me more is that companies like Google have come as far as they have. My kudos to those who sought to tackle it.

Yeah... Just yesterday I was driving at night, through road construction, with a torrential downpour, and nowhere to pull off, and it was freaking scary. And I remember just thinking, "This kind of thing happens to me maybe a few times a year and there's no way in 30 years that we're going to trust autonomy with this"

but isn't that part of the point? I doubt any automated system would consider driving in those conditions 'safe', so it would deal with the situation by pulling over to a safer spot and stop driving. Humans make terrible risk decisions in cases like that - continuing to drive in horrible snowstorms, etc, when the risks a way higher than our already-risky roads in normal conditions.

By not having the human make that decision, you save lives, even if some people arrive home late.

It does raise the point of 'rescue' in certain dangerous conditions like winter storms. Extreme rain in the dark can probably normally be waited out, but snowstorms and other road-closure type conditions probably warrant a different proactive rescue type response if we'll have riders with no driving ability in self-driving cars.

"Not driving in the insane conditions when humans are foolish to do so anyway" would IMHO allow routine drives in good weather in known terrain without roadworks, about half the year. Which is a great and magnificent improvement, in all honesty - that is, once we can get the marketing types to cool down from their current hype "it drives itself, full autonomy, everything and a pony*!!!!!!!"

I think this is a critical point. We need to reign in the customer's expectations that have already been set too high. They're already expecting to just get in and go anywhere while watching things on their phone or reading a book... soon. We already see this with people posting videos of sitting in the passenger seat while their Tesla rips down the highway in traffic.

Like anything it should be a graduated phase in. It will handle some of the conditions some of the time, and in time it will get better. It would be like me being frustrated I can't carry on a conversation about philosophy with my Google Home. "... but you said I could talk to it and ask it questions!!!"

Expecting a conversation on philosophy would be completely understandable - if the vendor sold it to you with the tagline "it has all the parts it needs for a philosophic conversation!" Google Home doesn't do that, Tesla does. (Musk doesn't even try to weasel around it: says "full self-driving features", Tesla marketing materials repeat. That is, in my opinion, a blunt lie.)

Self-driving cars can automatically check weather before starting the planned route and drive and avoid those situations.

In the past few years there were leaps so gigantic in the field of Computer Vision that they could be said to have happened overnight within the general pace of electronic technological development; within an eye's blink in the general scheme of things.

This made us so, so cocky. And man, if it's that easy to make a website that opens a webcam and tell you your gender and age to a remarkable degree of accuracy, surely self driving (or even playing Mario Kart well) must be within the next two breaths, right?

It's the unexpected things..

A few weeks ago I was driving home from my parents and suddenly found myself diverted off my usual route, off from a motorway. Google maps was not updated and rerouted itself to try to put me back on the normal route, which was to double back and rejoin the motorway before the diversion - if I had followed its instruction I would have been stuck in a loop! Hard to see how a self-driving car would cope with that. I guess part of any diversion in a self-driving future would involve the authorities informing Google about it beforehand.

But it got me thinking of even more unusual events (that are nonetheless not so unusual that a driver wouldn't expect to meet them at least once in their life) - what if you come across a fallen tree blocking the road? A human being could make an executive decision to drive over a footpath or through a field or reverse back up the road a little way if it was safe... how could an automated system hope to cope?

Falling back to the human driver seems a cop out. What if the passenger cannot drive?

Perhaps just a failure of imagination on my part. Some sort of mission control that gets connected to where some remote operations steer you out of difficulty? Or does one just "await rescue"?

I just wonder if self-driving is one of those problems where you can get 95% of it solved, but the remaining 5% remains uncrackable.

> I just wonder if self-driving is one of those problems where you can get 95% of it solved, but the remaining 5% remains uncrackable.

It's felt that way to me from the start. I tend to dwell on small details more than necessary and more than I imagine most people do. When I take a drive it's not just a drive to me, it's a series of countless decisions with more ambiguity than I'd trust to an algorithm. "Clean" driving conditions have to be seen as the edge case, not the norm.

I believe the AI that gives us acceptable search results is so far removed from the kind of human cognition that understands the world and reliably resolves everyday ambiguity that we're not only not close, we haven't even started on a track that gets us there.

The traffic situations could be handled by some sort of beacon system informing drivers within say 500m distance that on given road they need to take over computer because something exceptional is happening.

The problematic part would be something unplanned (ie car crash ahead of you). You can't leave this to other drivers (replacing car hazard button), because it would be very easily attackable to create chaos on the roads.

There are so many problems and corner cases that we could sit all evening and keep coming with more or less exotic ones. Just look at how busy traffic looks like in places like India.

Self-driving is probably #1 on my wishlist (next to true immersive VR), but boy that's HARD problem to solve. Maybe 2040 if companies keep the interest(money) in it.

People were claiming self-driving cars around the corner for ages.

This is the real issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...