I was talking about deep learning. The comment I was replying to was making the specific problem seem as if it were easy. Certainly there may one day be a class

I was talking about deep learning. The comment I was replying to was making the specific problem seem as if it were easy. Certainly there may one day be a classification technique that does what you say will do. But you may as well have said there will one day be a perfect classification technique that will just perfectly output steering angles, end thread. What use is there in conjecturing about perfect unknown classification techniques? Not to mention that there is no guarantee such a perfect method would not rely on aesthetics. Even if the train set has more than just aesthetics (e.g. video of cars in motion) maybe this perfect classifier would just cheat and rely on aesthetics, you don't know. So I'm pointing out the methodology you suggested is not currently feasible, or is currently widely considered by the community to be the wrong practical approach. Because theoretical solutions will not solve self driving cars.