[alkonaut]

My guess is that it (full 100% self driving) has around the same technological difficulty as putting a man on Mars. It also depends on what constitutes "100%" of course.

> How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade).

At that cost we could adapt all infrastructure to suit self driving cars, instead of developing self driving cars to adapt to human infrastructure. But I think that kind of cost is always going to be beyond what's acceptable.

I think the discussion is mostly pointless because of diminishing returns: if you can have "99.9% full self driving" for a tiny fraction of the cost, who would want to pay to go from 99.9% to 100%?

Initially human remote drivers will take care of the rest. And then there is a very slow commercial race towards using fewer humans that drives the very slow march to 99.9% and 99.99% self driving and so on. Driving the last second of the last edge case route is basically something that requires AGI (as long as we don't adapt infrastructure).

[Miraste]

I agree with most of this, but remote drivers are completely unfeasible with current or planned network infrastructure. You could drive with acceptable levels of sensor bandwidth and latency right next to an unobstructed low-utilization 5G tower, and that's about it. That's unlikely to correspond with the locations one would need remote drivers.

[alkonaut]

Luckily the hardest situations at least occur in cities and not on highways, and cities have good broadband. But yes, it's still "100%, but only here" a.k.a. not 100%

I think remote drivers will probably have to "rescue" cars without piloting them, usually just assessing a situation and overriding something (driving through an obstacle etc). A passenger (if there is one) could do the same. But sometimes actual remote driving would be required of course.