> It's an amazing capability but there are clearly still corner cases, and it makes you very aware of them.
The thing that most of these companies are failing to grasp is that the whole endeavor is like 99% corner cases. It's corner cases all the way down. The hope was that there was this big chunk of the problem space that could be handled in a tractable way, and that would hopefully account for ~80% of driving conditions. Then corner cases could be handled on an as-needed basis to fill in the gaps, and slowly you could handle more and more scenarios.
The problem is that the reason for so many corner cases in this domain is that driving is a social activity. The rules of the road actually belie how much communication between humans goes on when they are driving. Driving has its own norms, its own language, culture, emergent behaviors, and traffic exists as a crucial force that must be balanced in a city ecosystem. But autonomous cars aim to solve the driving problem by ignoring the social, and reducing it to an optimization problem. Autonomous cars are blind to the larger world around them except to recognize colors and the nearness of physical bodies.
They miss social cues, they lack higher order reasoning about traffic patterns, they can't negotiate with pedestrians or other drivers, they are unable to weigh the ethical considerations between when following a law is actually worse that breaking it.
As of now I consider them menaces on the road, and that pains me as someone who got to play with some of the first driverless car technology in the lab. I had such high hopes for it, and what I hoped was not... this.