Self-driving becomes orders of magnitude easier when you start making these sorts of changes to road infrastructure, yes. The conceit that needs to be made is that it isn’t going to happen
Self-driving is an immensely hard problem. Anyone who doesn't approach it with that mindset, will eventually be humbled. There is a huge a mount of "you don't know what you don't know". Expertise in making cars does not translate into expertise in making drivers.
My whole point is that if you make the environment more predictable you make the problem easier, not that the only thing you need to do is that. You seem to be attacking a strawman where somehow the whole environment is tailored towards self-driving cars by creating a police state and then the software is very simple. What I'm describing is using all the resources we already have to design and maintain roads to also help with solving the problem, together with all the technology that still has a long way to go. And if we can do that by doing things that also lower risks in normal driving I don't really see the downside. We already see that in the world. There are countries where it is much safer to drive because there's been a continuous focus on solving exactly this type of issues.
Look, if self-driving cars can't drive like a human then it's already game over. Of course it's possible to completely rearchitect our transportation systems to make autonomous transportation possible. Hell, we could install a series of movable tracks along the roads that send signals to vehicles that would remove virtually all of the difficulty. If autonomous vehicles aren't feasible without sweeping changes to traffic law then they're not feasible yet.
The issue is that building autonomous (not driver needed at all) is way more difficult than building self-driving cars which is pretty difficult by itself.
self driving cars would be easy if all the cars on the road were self driving, what makes it difficult is getting them to operate in an environment with illogical human drivers.
Self driving cars don’t need assistance from the environment.
We already have self driving cars in public streets that work. Arguing about the possibilities with self driving is like arguing about how good chess computers might some day become, it’s already been done.
Hitting the right price point, actually mapping the environment at scale, working out reliability, and bugs etc is real engineering. We are in that stage right between the prototype works and it’s ready for production which always takes longer than people expect but can it be done is no longer in question.
I would have thought this is pretty obvious. Fully self-driving cars are such an impossibly hard problem it makes no sense to try to jump straight there. It's much more logical to start with easier problems, like driver-assist, motorway-only, whitelisted roads, etc.
The self driving car doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be better than humans. That is a much lower bar. Self driving cars have already demonstrated their ability to handle traffic better than humans, but there are other situations where they are much worse.
Then it should be easy to show a self-driving car working in those conditions. Somehow, despite this argument coming up in virtually every discussion of this kind, nobody's done it yet.
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