[andreyk]

"BY THE AGE of seven months, most children have learned that objects still exist even when they are out of sight ... It is also something that self-driving cars do not have. And that is a problem. Autonomous vehicles are getting better, but they still don’t understand the world in the way that a human being does. For a self-driving car, a bicycle that is momentarily hidden by a passing van is a bicycle that has ceased to exist."

Where is this assertion coming from? Self driving requires planning which requires forward prediction and continuous object tracking, I highly doubt this is at all true.

"Modern AI is based on the idea of machine learning."

sigh..... while it's true a lot of the most ground-breaking advancements in AI over the past decade has been due to ML, it's not like it's the only set of techniques that are worked on as part of AI. For instance, self driving is a case in which many techniques that are used (planning, sensor fusion, filtering, etc.) are not ML-based.