Sad news. Apart from improving upon ML, can more sensors and physical modeling get us past the AV plateau? An example of an additional sensor would be an infar

Sad news. Apart from improving upon ML, can more sensors and physical modeling get us past the AV plateau? An example of an additional sensor would be an infared camera. I don't know how well infared cameras work during the day or when they are occluded, but they seem like they can provide an additional datapoint to classify an object as "person" for example. That way, it doesn't matter if they're wearing a paper bag Halloween costume, the car still knows what's underneath. Physical modeling seems like it would help with prediction. If a deer is idle on the side of road ahead, a car with a physical "deer" model would account for the probability that the deer will suddenly dart across the road and the speed at which it can possibly do so. It will slow down and watch for certain behaviors, such as the deer standing up from a prone position, and modify its probabilities accordingly. That is, after all, what we humans do. The ML wouldn't need to perfectly model all animals. Some animals would be put into a "mammal" class or more vague "animal" class, paying special attention to size and stature. Additionally, depending on how long it might take to develop truly autonomous self-driving cars, we might want to develop self-driving car friendly infrastructure. I'm talking about AV-only lanes with safeguards in place to minimize variability, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, infrastructure-to-vehicle communication, and better than average maintenance. It seems like it might be worth it, given the gains to be had. Here's an underappreciated angle to the AV-friendly infrastructure: it's a hedge against incorrect predictions. What if truly autonomous vehicles are actually 15 years away? In that case, if an "AV heaven" is developed in a corridor somewhere in Los Angeles 5 years from now, that'll be the only place where the AV dream is realized for the ensuing 10 years. The profit from "AV heaven" can be reinvested into AV development. It can also be used to expand into other areas. Moreover, AV heaven might galvanize the government, public, academia, and investors to eliminate any bottlenecks in AV development. There's no immutable stone tablet, only viewable by God, that says "AV development must take X years." We can modify the timeline to some extent. Lastly, AV heaven would allow us to observe the true value of self driving cars. What if they're better than we ever imagined? What if they radically change human behavior? What if they increase development in surrounding areas by a lot? What if they change the nature of work and where people live by more than we even expected? What if self-driving trucks + last mile bot delivery radically push down prices on everything and enable previously impractical business models or behavior? We actually know many of the changes that AVs will bring, but, critically, we don't know the magnitude of those changes.