> The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. See that's where you

> The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. See that's where you're wrong. An autonomous vehicle doesn't have to have a human brain. It has to have very accurate sensors and classifiers tuned with generous safety params. Like any vehicle it also needs redundancies for safety and sane default behavior (mostly "slam on the breaks"). Also, not "anything can happen." There are rules that govern the road that make this problem tractable. There are rules that govern physics that mean if you have adequate sensors + compute you can avoid hitting any objects at all, whether it's a person or otherwise. "Object x is 30 ft away with trajectory y, we're going 15mph, slam on the brakes." The difficulties mostly lie in how we can "not slam on the brakes all the time and never make progress." e.g if you enter a construction zone you better know what to do and not just sit still, otherwise you'll never get anywhere.