Comment Re:It won't understand situations, it shouldn't ma (Score 4, Insightful) 451
I'm really sorry to have to be so direct but that is the dumbest argument I've ever heard.
Driving is not a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of reaction. Sure, intelligence and experience help you anticipate when other drivers are being idiots, but there is very little involved in driving that can not be compensated by reaction time and adhering to proper distances.
The biggest hurdle to take is to correctly measure the surroundings. If you did that via image recognition, then yes, AI would be important. But there is laser, radar, GPS and so many other sensors involved that do nothing more than note distances to targets, location on road etc.
Autonomous driving certainly isn't trivial, but the other thing you have to keep in mind is that your oh so intelligent human drivers are actually driving like morons a lot of the time.
Please stop putting the bar for autonomous driving so high the systems have to practically be perfect the be viable. The moment they are twice as good as a human should be the moment we start switching. And we're not far from that.
Remember how badly the average driver actually drives. And then remember that half of them drive worse than that.
Add on top of that networked driving, where cars coordinate over several hundred meters and you'll see so much potential gain even from non-perfect systems it's staggering.