Why fully automated cars are a lot further away than you think

Don't hold your breath waiting for the first fully autonomous car to hit the streets anytime soon. Car manufacturers have projected for years that we might have fully automated cars on the roads by 2018. But for all the hype that they bring, it may be years, if not decades, before self-driving systems are reliably able to avoid accidents, according to a blog published Tuesday in The Verge. The million-dollar question is whether self-driving cars will keep getting better – like image search, voice recognition and other artificial intelligence "success stories" – or will they run into a "generalization" problem like chatbots (where some chatbots couldn't make unique responses to questions)? Generalization, author Russell Brandom explained in the blog Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock, can be difficult for conventional deep learning systems.