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This utopian vision will never come to pass without a major investment in infrastructure, on the kind of scale that could more easily re-work our current city layouts with more modern and reliable mass transit, even to the exurbs.
If you don’t believe this, and you think 100% autonomous vehicles are possible without this infrastructure, check out the research on “adversarial inputs” just as a start. A researcher I talked to who does this work said they trapped a vehicle with traffic cones in front and behind so the car could not move without bumping something, which triggered its “don’t hit anything” programming. A sticker on a stop sign could make the AI refuse to acknowledge there is a stop sign on the corner.
They won’t be as safe as human drivers unless they have their own place to operate away from humans. And if we’re taking humans that far out of the equation, what’s the actual point of 100% autonomous vehicles anymore?