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 would be easy if all cars were self driving, all roads were designed for self driving cars, roads did not degrade, there are no pedestrians, no cyclists, trash or other obstructions could appear on the road, weather did not exist, and the sensory hardware could not get damaged or obstructed.
Very true but lets pretend we are in the real world where making all these changes is exponentially harder than only changing the cars. Listening to Geo-shot the main problem is to get them to co-exist with human drivers.
And even then... Any sufficiently complex system is chaotic (behaves in surprising, non-linear ways). And traffic networks pretty certainly constitute a sufficiently complex system.
And they already exist under these conditions: automated subway trains.
Very true Haha.
I'm certainly unconvinced that the first part of that statement is true. We've seen self-driving cars run into static obstacles. We still need to deal with emergent behaviour of groups of self-driving cars. There are still unpredictable environmental factors that we rely on humans to work out now.