I actually suspect pilotless airliners are a lot "easier" (with huge air quotes) of a problem. Like, it's
really cool what they can do, the tech is... bad ass in every conceivable way. But driving is a crazy, dynamic environment. There's a whole group of people who are working on the psychology involved in it all and trying to model that too.
Like, imagine you're waiting to walk across the street. You make eye contact with the driver, he sees you, you see him. How close can you reasonably get to the car now? Humans will get really close even if the vehicle is still moving... really close. Once you've made eye contact there's a social contract made, and you know that the driver won't run you over, so you can get extremely close to the road. This screws with self-driving vehicles, because humans are comfortable being
closer to a vehicle or even starting out into the street after they've locked eyes with the driver. How does a robot handle that? And that's just 1 problem.
Largely, I think the result will be, "These should be all on rails so people can't get run over and accidents can't happen" and tech will have "re-invented" the train.
The conference was great, but I remember reading several posters and thinking, "oh, I'm the only airplane person here, because this is a problem we solved in aviation like 40 years ago..."
I think we'll get it right eventually (hopefully) - I think legal responsibility for the performance of your self-driving vehicle will be what drives capability not pure tech. I think the "right" path is what Mercedes-Benz is doing presently. Small iterative steps are better than "all at once" in some applications.
Mercedes-Benz is the first automaker to bring an SAE Level 3 system to the U.S. market.
abcnews.go.com