[rayiner]

I don't think it does. The technology we have for self-driving cars in the near term relies on a known map, and the route-finding core of that technology isn't going to be appreciably better, any time soon, than what's in Siri. You can improve the technology by adding vehicle-to-vehicle communications, etc, but now you're pushing out the "5-6 years" timeline that people keep throwing around.

I have no doubt that in 50 years we'll have self-driving cars. It's not an intractable problem by any means. But I have friends who were researching self-driving cars a decade ago, as part of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and in many ways those techniques were more sophisticated than what's on the table for commercialization in the near-term. It's going to be a very long slough from here to there.