[virgilp]

I got bear-ish on self-driving cars when I realized that, in order to be able to drive in Bucharest, you _have to_ break the (letter of the) law fairly often[1]. Knowing when to do so requires "common sense" which is a notoriously difficult nut to crack - computer vision may be advanced enough, but it's simply not enough. I still think it will evolve in time and reach mass-market, it's just that it will take lots of time - it's not something that will have a purely-technological solution, it will likely require legal and social changes too, and those take time.

[1] E.g. Car stopped in front; do you cross the continuous line to go to the opposite lane, or just wait a bit? Or merging from a side street into a busy main road.... some drivers will let you, but which ones? If you wait until "it's safe", well, good luck.

[semi-extrinsic]

This is another good point. There's a hardware store near to where I live where it's literally illegal (if you observe the signs) to enter or exit the parking lot of said store. Everyone just understands that someone forgot to remove a road sign saying "buses only, cars forbidden" for the lane where you enter this parking lot. But how would a computer understand this?

[xyzzyz]

I’m not sure that figuring out when to break the law in your example is any harder then figuring out when turning left is legal and safe on unprotected intersection. This is not to say that it's easy, but autonomous vehicles need to solve problems exactly like that one on a regular basis.

[virgilp]

Yes - and I was saying that I realized that solving these problems require the elusive "common sense". If we get that figured out, even just roughly, I think we'll break the barrier of general-purpose AI. I'm not sure we're close to doing that... But, maybe I'm wrong.