Compare this to the conventional self-driving car approach which breaks the task into different components - lane finding, other car detection, guard rail location and so on. In most cases a detailed and accurate map of the road is also required and the program is essentially a set of if..then.. rules that use the input features to deterministically generate the outputs. This approach to self-driving cars comes with a measure of verifiability that gives confidence that the design works and why it doesn't. For example, the recent Google self driving car crash with a bus resulted in a bus detector being added to the system so it wouldn't happen again. The problem with this "engineering" approach is that the system can't cope with anything that it encounters that is new.