[bob457]

It seems to me that one of the difficulties we have with making robots is trying to model them too closely after ourselves. We don’t have a humanoid maid, but we do have a roomba; similarly for lots of industrial automation. Home automation doesn’t look like c3po walking around your house flipping light switches.

It seems like maybe not the best reasoning to say “humans, do it this way, so that’s how my robot should do it.”

[marcinzm]

Except a Roomba is much more limited than a human maid even in the constrained task of vacuuming the floor. And for a self-driving car you do need human levels of performance. Nor can you cheat and redo the infrastructure to accommodate simpler system like with home automation (ie: replace light switches withe relays).

[dawnim]

Except that you could most definitely repurpose some infrastructure to better suit AD. Having a somewhat protected AD only lane in cities would allow, today even, autonomous transport to be utilized.