"How can Tesla claim self driving if the car can’t read a sign that says - speed limit 25 mph during school hours, and properly adjust?"
Self driving will always be dangerous unless overall traffic infrastructure is updated.
Can you imagine a train where the 100% of the onus of auto-baking falls on the train itself, without zero input from sensors and towers outside the train?
> Self driving will always be dangerous unless overall traffic infrastructure is updated.
I don't see how people can propose this kind of thing with a straight face, when we live in a world where we can't even afford to replace the paint on the road when it gets worn away.
Yeah, sure, governments everywhere will be lining up to pay billions of dollars for putting up and maintaining new infrastructure to provide us with some low ROI shiny toys. And I have a bridge on a blockchain to sell you.
We would need to re-think resource allocation. Fewer deaths means smaller healthcare expenditure. Disability claims. Improved road infrastructure doesn't need to be that expensive.
Yes? That is pretty easy to imagine actually. It would be much less efficient than the current system with a central train controller, but it is definitely imaginable.
In the case of Tesla massively failing to drive safely in a school area: If you cannot operate safely, don't allow autopilot to engage at all.
Yes! I would rather spend resources to standardize “smart” traffic control infrastructure, where vehicles and road/street constantly communicate with each other even if it would just be for augmenting drivers’ awareness. For example in-car warnings about abrupt stop ahead, train approaching level crossing, positions of nearby vehicles, traffic light cycles, actual speed limits etc… Training “AI” to make sense of (sometimes barely) human readable signs and clues is waste of time in my opinion. Maybe just for helping with low speed obstacle avoidance…
I think the central thesis of OP is that the current infrastructure is built for humans. We seem to do OK. So, if anything, these kinds of issues are an indictment of the failure of self-driving tech that was boosted to insane hype around 2017-2018. Now we're getting to a phase called "Trough of Disillusionment" in the Gartner terminology. If we require the rest of the infrastructure to be rebuilt for self-driving tech, then it is a irrefutable admission of failure.
Reading speed limits signs is the easy part compared to figuring out how to handle all the kids walking to school on the sidewalk next to the road (any kid might get pushed into traffic, or decide to start crossing right there...). Even figuring out school hours is easy. Of course it isn't just kids, I've had to handle a bear on the road in front of me before.
> Can you imagine a train where the 100% of the onus of auto-baking falls on the train itself, without zero input from sensors and towers outside the train?
I'm not hugely familiar with trains, but as I understand it, trains in the general case have a much worse braking distance to visibility ratios than cars do.
Roads are generally designed to be safely navigable in good conditions when their occupants are obeying the speed limit, without external sensors. Rail lines are designed to be safely navigable only with the aid of external sensors. That's why trains can take blind corners at speed.
Many years ago I was surprised to find out how traffic-detecting intersection lights worked.
I assumed computer vision had been solved and they had reliable enough detection of cars, so you could just plop a few cameras in the intersection to detect waiting cars and start the transition when safe.
Nope! Instead, large numbers of intersections are dug up and electromagnets are installed to detect cars. These are very sensitive (but can miss cyclists) and super-simple; a microcontroller can reliably detect a car as a pulse on a line.
Self driving will always be dangerous unless overall traffic infrastructure is updated.
Can you imagine a train where the 100% of the onus of auto-baking falls on the train itself, without zero input from sensors and towers outside the train?