I imagine a lot of things look not all that hard when you're trying to build a rocket that can go to space, come back down and neatly land itself on a helipad...
Don't get me wrong as a parent - I am super excited that perhaps - just perhaps, my kids when they are ready to hit the road won't have to worry about learning how to drive :D and I can rest easy the other drivers won't be crazy too.
Guess what, humans also suck at this. What would YOU do? Do you hit the oncoming traffic, drive off the cliff, hit the kid? Likely the right choice is to slam on the breaks and hope for the best. That's likely the same choice the computer would make, only it will have a faster reaction time making it more likely for the kid to make it.
We kill 30,000 people a year driving. Humans suck at driving as a general rule. Will a self driving car be able to handle icy foggy roads? Probably not. And it will note that ahead of time and say dude you really shouldn't be going out in this, I can't handle it. If you want to try it, you'll have to drive yourself today.
And why is it always a child? You sound like a politician trying to make a "think of the children" argument.
This is why self-driving cars are going to be far safer than humans. Your self-driving cars will see a thousand hazardous situations as you are driving and adjust to avoid them pre-emptively and silently.
Yes, there will be some bugs on the way there. And it will kill a few people. But we kill about 30,000 people in car crashes per year and about 5,000 pedestrians per year with cars.
The programs could be quite buggy, and still beat that by I suspect a very wide margin.
Very few humans can execute split-second, emergency decisions correctly.
Most simply panic and whatever happens, happens.
Are you asking whether the life of the child should be given more priority than the life of the occupant? Who knows. Regardless, my bet is the car will perform better, by any measure, than a human. If only by being a lot quicker to respond and avoid the situation entirely.
I think the tough problems involve communication and negotiation with other drivers. A car might have a hard time detecting eye contact, or noticing when someone is waving you to go ahead. It might also be bad at being aggressive enough to merge. But some of these things human drivers are really bad at....especially new drivers or the elderly, both of whom are often timid. People might be able to see that it is an autonomous car and be more likely to take advantage of the fact that they know the car won't do anything rash like risk an accident to force its way in.
The nice thing is that these cars are going to keep a lot of data. Some people may not like that, but I don't think it's a bad thing that if you keep driving dangerously, the autonomous cars are going to note your license plate number and your insurance company is going to find out.
The question will be, was the human responsible? Should he/she have hit the 'stop' button, and was their intoxication the reason why. Will they be charged with vehicular manslaughter?
- You need a piece of plastic and metal to unlock it. Losing that object is a serious inconvenience, especially if you're on a road trip. Compare that to unlocking your cellphone or your bank account.
- It doesn't have a "settings" functionality. For example, you can't configure a car to refuse to move if a seatbelt is unbuckled. Such a feature (perhaps a default that you can disable if you really want to) would save many lives.
- It would be easy to write an app to help you optimize your driving for safety / fuel efficiency if you could download data that most cars have, but you can't.
- Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives.
These are just a few examples of ways in which most cars in the market are archaic and inefficient. This is mostly because of two reasons: the incumbents have no incentive to make changes that don't increase sales, and governments don't pressure car manufacturers to include state-of-the-art life saving technology until it has existed for a LONG time and everyone knows about it:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislati...
The difficulty in making self-driven cars the norm is mostly about the politics of the transition.
It's definitely not trivial.
If traffic sign recognition really was a solved problem, every car manufacturer would have implemented it by now. If implementation really was trivial, we'd all be talking about which self-driving car we're going to buy this year, not when the first self-driving car might become available.