Autononmous isnt a threat to motorsports, indifference is. The car as a cultural symbol has been diminishing for over a decade. There is no turning back, fewer and fewer people care about cars, owning them or wearing them as a status symbol. The times, they are a changing.

The programmers will never be able to make a perfect autonomous vehicle. Every little accident will be jumped on by the ambulance chasing lawyers who see a huge pot of gold to go after. The car manufacturers will simply have to admit they cannot take responsibility for complete control of the vehicle.

We will forever be limited to driver assists.

P.S. I met you at the Darlington Walmart in September 2017. I was the second fan in line. Thank you for being kind to me and my family.

Essay: file:///C:/Users/Nicholas/Downloads/Proposal%20Argument%20Final%20draft.pdf

I think your assertion that humans are more capable than computers because humans can draw on experience and process some situations better and more quickly than computers is wrong. Computers draw on experience and they don’t forget. I can’t think of any task that humans could perform more quickly than a well trained computer. Complex analysis like the log on the truck you describe would, I believe, always be better handled more accurately and more quickly by a computer. Don’t forget, you are a better driver than about 99.9999% of the drivers out there.

As far as seeing the road, an autonomous car with vision, radar and sonar will see the road when a human wouldn’t stand a chance. Imagine that your cars computer was communicating with the computer of the car ahead of you. Now it can see ‘thru’ the car ahead.

Liability is always tricky but managed. Autonomous cars will ultimately result in many fewer accidents making the liability question less of an issue. You are looking at it from the perspective that there will be constant issues arising from mistakes the computer makes. I think it will be pretty rare.

I thought Elon Musk was being paranoid when he stated that robots are scary and will take over the world unless we do something about it now until I read about how his AI group made a software bot that beat the best players in the world at a game that makes chess look easy. They taught the bot the basic rules of the game and how to reproduce itself. It reproduced itself, played the new replicant, reproduced the winner and repeated the process for a few generations and became unbeatable. Your Tesla is doing that right now. Plus, it has not only its own experience to learn from but, all the other Teslas experiences too.

Driverless cars will happen and they will be superior to every driver with the possible exception of you!