I think this is a little terrifying, people are now learning that they don't have to pay attention to the road because the car takes care of everything.
And I don't trust the new car-technology that much. One little error and the car drives over and through everything.
Gonna explain a bit. I am not worried about the tech on interstates - interstates are as controlled as it gets.
IMO, we're a long way away from true self-driving in city / smaller road situations. There are just too many "adversarial input" combinations, and your average ML approach is to put all the videos etc and churn it up into one giant model, because breaking down data to semantic components is
hard.
Let's take an example. You take training data by making a video of a car driving through a neighborhood. The model will learn "best case" scenarios - here's the stop light, here's the stop sign, etc.
But what if, for whatever reason, someone threw up green sneakers up to a telephone line? How do you know the model won't interpret that as a green light? The answer is - you
don't. The way to prevent that is to kind of teach the model semantic information, like, we have roads and they have these street lights that direct traffic, instead of letting the model pick up data entirely on its own. But for reasons I won't get into, this is not a favored approach.
However, the chance of adversarial inputs on interstate highways is very low. What would scare me the most there is rainy conditions - because that generates a ton of reflective surfaces and can confuse the computer. But my car will stop self-driving when it gets rainy, so I assume there are safeguards there.
But smart car tech doesn't have to be "self-driving" in order to be helpful. It will tell me if I'm going too fast or too slow without monitoring the speedometer. It'll stop me from going over a lane. It will brake if a kid jumps out in front of me. It will show the top-down view when parking so I can have confidence I am situated in the middle of a space. Etc. It is not a complete solution, but it does ease a lot of little worries.
