Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for some reason often believed by otherwise quite smart people I don't understand why so many smart "tech people" fall for the hype. Maybe it is because "machine learning" is just abstract enough that even the most jaded developer thinks they can treat it like a black box where if you pour enough videos, photos and LIDAR readings for training into the top it will somehow spit out a fully autonomous self driving car…
The way you suggest the future of automotive transport rests on a fast food chain drive through suggests a kind of astroturfing social media advert. If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way. None of those things are physically complex - the car will be able to see or lidar if a space is big enough for it to park in, pulling over to pick up a fri…
I don't care about how physically complex something is. You didn't tell me how I'd tell the self driving car which spot to park in or which person on the corner is my friend. If you think this detail is minor, trivial or doesn't matter.... you are sadly mistaken.
> If burgers were that important, the burger company would partner with the self driving car company and find a way.
So you are telling me your $70,000 self driving car can't take me through one of the hundreds of thousands of drive thru's out there? That sounds pretty shitty.
> You don't choose the parking spot anymore than you chose the lane or the highway exit
You are telling me that this self-driving taxi will just stop at whatever place it feels like? How will I tell it precisely where to let me out? Remember it is pouring down rain / I am physically disabled and cannot walk very far / I am not entirely sure where I need to be dropped off until I get there.
So seriously, how will I command this self-driving car? Nobody seems to be able to answer this or even thought about it in any amount of detail at all. Probably because we are so far away from an actual self driving car that a realistic answer doesn't really matter at all.
And that is the problem with self-driving hype. Every time you ask about a specific detail it gets hand waved away as not important or some kind of edge case that doesn't matter. Guess what... edge cases matter. Your edge case is my important case. You add up all these edge cases that "don't matter" and you've excluded almost your entire market.