You're moving a bunch of goalposts here. Mapping isn't required at all for self-driving, it's required for self-navigation. Also, the obvious solution to mappi

You're moving a bunch of goalposts here. Mapping isn't required at all for self-driving, it's required for self-navigation. Also, the obvious solution to mapping is to let every car provide input as they're driving. What do you think Google is doing with both Google Maps and Waze? They collect a shit-ton of data while people are using those apps and driving. There's your mapping. For untrained or unpredictable situations, you don't need a breakthrough, you just need the steady improvement of sensors and computer vision. You only need to encounter a situation once for the entire fleet of self-driving cars to be trained on it. For computing, you don't need breakthroughs, you just need more, and we're getting more, every year, steadily. Self-driving cars is not a matter of flashes of genius, it's a boring matter of economics of making the sensors cheap enough, the data collection cheap enough, the computing cheap enough, for it to be fitted to every car and there we go.