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Comment by ema | Hacker News Reader

The cameras of the self driving car of course. I assume converting these inputs into maps that are usable enough for this purpose is much easier than driving a car in city conditions. So _if_ we get self driving cars we also get live updated maps of the surrounding circle with a radius ~20m.

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Which can now see behind corners, underground and over terrain. Magic, I say, pure magic!

Not that people actually driving cars off the road are capable of this now. I'd often wish for a remote control when parking in constricted spaces.

They are not - but then you're back to driving, although using the touchscreen. Completely different from the original proposition "tell the car where to go, it will do the rest". You're just exposing a different control API to the human controlling the car (a.k.a. driver), that's hardly driverless.

TL;DR: "remote control" != "self-driving"

Correct - but the starting point here was already 'take this path', not 'go to that location on the grass'.

Come to think about it - even 'just park somewhere' is remarkably complicated. I don't quite understand why self-driving cars should need external high quality maps and can't make do with onboard cameras as human drivers do.

But then the parking requires either a high-quality database of valid and off-limits parking locations, or the ability of the car to read the signs on parking lots and generally be able to distinguish private from public parking.

Which is sort of my point: lots of things that seem simple to a human (but actually consist of many rules from various domains, not all of them explicit or universal) are thus handwaved away as "a few minor issues," even though every single of them is at least an UX friction point, and in sum they're significant blockers on the path to actual driverless vehicles. Since Minsky started meddling with AI, the hype always considers "70% there" as "done." AIchilles and the turtle, so to speak ;)

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