Comment Re:Driving is filled with intractible problems (Score 1) 287
“As it turns out, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer. As we’ve encountered thousands of different situations, we’ve built software models of what to expect, from the likely (a car stopping at a red light) to the unlikely (blowing through it).
“We still have lots of problems to solve, including teaching the car to drive more streets in Mountain View before we tackle another town, but thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously,” Urmson writes. (Chris Urmson is head of the self-driving car project at Google)
Smarter people than you have been working on these problems for years already and have made significant progress. Other locations also have research going on. Virginia Tech, for example has a self-driving/autonomous vehicle program that is also working on navigation of complex environments. Hazard collision detection and autonomous steering and pacing is already in production vehicles (and has been for a couple of years).
The good thing about computers is that they can be programmed to fail gracefully, stopping when conditions do not meet the requirements for safe continuation. Unlike humans, who can't figure out when they're too drunk, tired, old, or distracted to drive safely. Everything will come in steps - collision avoidance assistance, then highway autonomy, then known-city autonomy, then full autonomy with driver, and finally full autonomy without driver (passengers w/o driving skills). You won't get that last phase in the next couple of years, but I anticipate it will happen before I'm too old to safely navigate the roads.