[hefferbub]

I too wonder about the way good drivers anticipate circumstances and prepare themselves to respond. That might indeed be hard to replicate.

But then I realized that detecting these kinds of patterns (kid chasing ball, car next to you that is stuck behind a slow driver, bumper to bumper with a merge approaching, etc.) are precisely what machine learning is good at.

Arguably it could get better at it than any human because it draws not just on the situations one person happens to have encountered in their lifetime. Rather the model that gets uploaded to each car is built from the experiences of millions of cars on billions of miles of driving taking place (eventually) over decades.

Perhaps at some point the quantity of relevant data more than compensates for the greater reasoning and fluidity of a human brain.

It’s hard to know until someone’s tech actually gets there…