[Piskvorrr]

Near-exhaustive search of what? You're handwaving away that there isn't a stateless formal graph to search - rather a stochastic, everchanging environment. Again: how do you near-exhaustively search that?

(In other words, yes, it might be eventually possible to have self-driving vehicles, but pretending that the search space is bounded, or even near-exhaustively searchable a la chess - that's just pure technobabble)

[mavhc]

Well yes, my original comment was mostly a joke after all.

Anyway, self driving cars will only get better, and the more of them there are the better they will be, because no humans around doing weird things who don't talk over the SDC network to explain where they're going

[Piskvorrr]

Now that is a future that I can at least imagine, starting with SDV-only enclaves: "no humans driving on the West Coast" etc. Still doesn't solve other road users (cyclists, pedestrians), but it would definitely do away with entire classes of problems.