How many years or decades did we spend answering them before it got to where it today?
I’m all for optimism, but these problems are clearly much harder than the futurists would like the public to believe. Elon said Teslas would be driving across the country to pick up their owners by 2018. 6 years later and what does it do, drive across a parking lot?
Trains are also a solved problem, and seem like a much better solution to the problem. With rails, a vast majority of the complexity around driving goes away. They also remove traffic instead of keeping it the same or making it worse. Less traffic would likely mean fewer accidents, even if humans are still the ones driving. And batching transit together, with dozens of people in one vehicle is going to be far more energy efficient than everyone running their own vehicle. It also solves the issue of drunk driving, distracted driving, and bad drivers in general, as everyone is just a passenger.
So much money, time, talent, and energy has gone into this self driving stuff, and it seems like a massive misallocation of resources. They’re solving the wrong problem.
In fact, visual challenges like this are a mostly solved problem, and the real magic is the classification that happens behind the scenes.