> Were such a car to exist, it is clear the dog would win in very very many environments (almost all). As would a mouse, let alone a dog.

This seems incredibly unlikely. AI vastly outperforms 99.99% of humans on various video games, and 100% on many others. I'll bet on a well trained ml model over a dog every time.

> That it may be possible to rig a human environment to be replete with so many symbols (road signs, etc.) that an incredibly dumb automated system can follow them is hardly here-nor-there.

We already have above average human performance with just normal road signs, and could also simply use digital information.

> Self-driving cars may work on highways and motorways; I don't see there being any in cities. Not for centuries.

Goalpost shifting

IMHO the biggest problem is the moral problem; even once the tech achieves better reliability in general (as compared to human drivers, who are quite crappy but we're all used to them), the cases when it will fail will be so spectacular and cause so much outrage because we're ill equipped to deal with situations where there is nobody to blame: we always try to find somebody to hold responsible. When there is none, we make them up (deities and whatnot).

When natural disaster strike, people feel plenty of emotions, including anger. Often that anger though cannot be directed to anybody in particular. ("God isn't easily sued

When machines misbehave, being by definition human made, it's harder to accept it "as just the way the world works".

"centuries"

Centuries is a long, long time in science and technology. It is 2021. If we take "centuries" to mean two centuries, railways with steam engines were not yet a thing in 1821. Cars without horses much less so.

None of us can predict the state of computer science in 2221.

my point was just a crude attempt to dispel the myth that flesh has anything to do with efficiency at some task. What matters is design, and the immense research powers that nature has through eons of natural selection does an impressive job and doing things for which it has been "trained for" (hence your example).

> rescuing humans

Vague and undefined, mostly a hardware problem, not an intelligence problem

> detecting cancers and disease

AI is a strong tool for detecting many cancers, and in some areas of research, just using the same olfactory data as dogs: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> shepherding

Again, not so much an intelligence problem, but a hardware problem. Nonetheless

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/09/stress-test-au...

> protecting family from threats

In terms of ability to recognize and classify a threat, AI is clearly superior here. Dogs have terrible false positive rates.