As someone who does quite a bit of software engineering as part of my work, I really do not see self-driving cars a possibility anywhere in the near future. It's also quite irritating that everyone is jumping on this bandwagon, with tons of (often hilarious) comments coming from people that have never written a line of code.
I've posted this video in another forum before. I am aware that Tesla's offer very rudimentary autonomous features, however it highlights the primary issue with self-driving cars.
The fundamental problem is that we simply do not have true artificial intelligence. Sure we have systems that can mimic AI in some ways, but these systems still go as far as the programmer(s) that designed them. A computer program is still just a bunch of subroutines no matter how complex and will always operate within the boundaries of its design. I often find this point a little hard to explain. How will autonomous cars handle chaos, unpredictable, unexpected and random events, sensor failure....
For anyone interested, look up "Moral Machine" and Trolley Problem. Autonomous cars face a lot of challenges.... sticking a bunch of sensors and lidars onto a car and mapping out the environment is just a small part.
I definitely would not want to be part of a team that was tasked to write code that handles real life autonomous driving scenarios.
