The difference between this and the Iphone 1 is that the technology is not there yet for fully autonomous cars, and it's unclear you can get there just by trying really hard and spending lots of money. Fully self-driving cars wouldn't just have to stay in their lane on the freeway, they would have to make the decisions during edge-case driving situations that a human would. That means knowing to slow down when a ball rolls across the road, reading people's hand signals, responding correctly when a police car tries to stop traffic on the freeway, etc. I'm not sure how you even begin to handle cases like that. Our driving situation was designed for humans, so you would have to make the algorithm "think like a human" and understand all our wierd idiosyncrasies. So far, machine learning has had very little luck with trying to similate human decision-making.
What Tesla has done so far with "autopilot" is a big deal, but releasing a "video of a car driving itself" is the classic marketing trick with machine learning, where you cherry pick aituations in which your system does well, and most people don't second guess it.
What Tesla has done so far with "autopilot" is a big deal, but releasing a "video of a car driving itself" is the classic marketing trick with machine learning, where you cherry pick aituations in which your system does well, and most people don't second guess it.