I get how ML works. I don't mean loops as a for(int i) loop, but the concept of a loop itself, a circle. A self-driven car with ML decision making is still bounded by some rules we will be forced to compromise on. Some people at MIT are focusing on deaths per miles driven as a safety metric to determine whether we can replace humans with ai cars and when that might happen.
But given the constraints of ML/ai you will eventually have a bounded container where an ai car can operate and where it can't. The car will be tasked with looping through that environment from job to job then back to recharge at it's base station. For all the sophistication of getting the car on the road and working it won't really be making up it's own story through the world nor will it understand the greater context of it's actions. The pattern recognition in CV is great, but it is fed by humans, so the meaning that a tree should be avoided has been initially put in by a programmer, even if the car in the moment chooses to avoid the tree by itself. The car is crunching meaningless numbers like a pipe directs water.
So when people say a machine "understands something" it can't ever really be true because all of our machines don't know what is going on in the world, they only know what numbers they see and how to behave when those numbers change. At the very bottom it's electricity looping through logic gates and that same principle is repeated all the way up to a car that loops through it's environment and comes back.
If all the humans left the planet, the car wouldn't be described as understanding the world, it'll be seen as a generic device sitting in a garage somewhere waiting for orders from a human. If you fill the earth with aliens the CV breaks not having seen aliens before, the roads get changed over time by nature, the high detail mapping it relies on fails. The cars "understanding" only exists as an outcome of electric impulse. It doesn't understand and never could. We are building more and more sophisticated loops, and I'm glad, but to think computers can understand is a doomed project. They will never "get" the values, intents and stories we put in them. Computers will forever be a labour of love is not able to regress into understanding what we mean it to be.