"robots sophisticated enough to [...] improve on lackluster human perception" This underlying misapprehension is at the root of the self-driving car hubris. Hu

"robots sophisticated enough to [...] improve on lackluster human perception" This underlying misapprehension is at the root of the self-driving car hubris. Humans have remarkable perception of physical environments. The fact that electronic systems can beat humans handily on a few metrics has led to an entire industry built on the misconception that those few metrics are all that matter. But those were just the trivial bits. The more sophisticated perceptual tasks--even the basic ones involved in the simplest self-driving task of traveling down a restricted access freeway--like correctly interpreting the behavior of other cars; interpreting whether the debris in the road constitutes a dangerous obstacle or something easily driven over; or even knowing which objects speeding toward you are moving and which are stationary--require more than just raw sensory input. There's a mountain of implicit cultural awareness embedded into all of those perceptual tasks that we haven't begun to form an idea how to represent in a software system. And again, this is the easy stuff!