Full self driving in the general case will probably not exist in our lifetimes. It's like chasing an imaginary pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. So the industry should aim for goals that are actually technically feasible and will deliver tangible safety improvements.
I disagree. The progress of camera and laser technology, in addition to AI, is improving at an incredible rate. The market for self-driving vehicles is huge -- any company that figures it out will make billions (maybe trillions).
Computers can have a perfect 360 degree view and track and categorize every object around them. Humans will be both physically and intellectually outmatched eventually. And humans just aren't that good at driving on average.
You're welcome to disagree, but so far there's no hard evidence to support your viewpoint. Just a lot of hype.
Past rates of progress are not indicative of the future. The easy problems have already been solved. Now progress is already slowing down.
In particular the notion that computer vision can reliably track and categorize every object is just laughable. The state of computer vision research is nowhere close to that capability. Errors are frequent, especially under adverse conditions.
In November 2017, Waymo announced that it had begun testing driverless cars without a safety driver in the driver position. In October 2018, Waymo announced that its test vehicles had traveled in automated mode for over 10,000,000 miles (16,000,000 km), increasing by about 1,000,000 miles (1,600,000 kilometres) per month.
In Arizona, Waymo has fully autonomous taxi service you can use right now. https://waymo.com/apply/
