I don't think Jim really spent a lot of time trying to solve the autonomous driving problem :) It's a bit funny that he's so confident about something he's clearly not an expert in. He's not the right guy for these questions. You basically need strong AI for driving. It seems like you don't but you actually do. Because the safety margin is 1e-7% and the long tail of distribution of odd and unusual cases at that point starts including too many complex situations requiring complex reasoning. Also the safety requirements from an autonomous system are actually much higher than from a human. Trajectories are not just one thing they are probability densities and there's all kinds of uncertainties. Plus computer vision simply still doesn't work well enough for safety applications. It needs an improvement of about 6-7 orders of magnitude vs state of the art now, which is about the same as improvement from perceptron of the 60s to ResNet. The difference here is strong AI is next stage of evolution and humans will not be necessary anymore. For now, in production it's surprisingly challenging to even build a system with near zero false positives and some miniscule true negatives :) If you have non-safety applications like speech or some other consumer toy, AI works much better now than in the 90s. But for safety applications not so much, it's useless still.