> The data from each situation would be ingested and analyzed so the car could learn what to do in the future. Those lessons could, hopefully, be applied to a broad range of driving conundrums.
This is huge. Maybe a handful of cars are learning there way around slowly, but if they have legitimate automatic learning systems, imagine two or three thousand cars all learning together.
This is a major piece in the overall puzzle that the article doesn't really explore. Google's greatest strategic advantage is networked systems - each additional driverless car is a mobile, sensor-packed learning system for all other driverless cars. I strongly doubt that the plan is for each car to 'learn' how to handle each new driving situation independently - as soon as one car learns a behavior, they all learn that behavior.
That level of networked learning system is probably not fully mature, but it's certainly not far from reality.
This is huge. Maybe a handful of cars are learning there way around slowly, but if they have legitimate automatic learning systems, imagine two or three thousand cars all learning together.