Re: "Clever car?" and aircraft autopilot
"programmers of self-driving automobiles face a challenge probably two orders of magnitude greater than programmers of aviation or nautical autopilot devices."
Agreed, completely. That's probably why we've had decent autopilots for 30 years or more, and are still refining and testing various AV technologies.
Also, besides complexity and proximity, the sensor situation is much more difficult in traffic.
On the other hand, our digital electronics is many orders of magnitude more capable, and we seem to be sorting out the algorithms, both directly, and as a result of progress in various other fields.
There will be some failures in software, even after we figure out how to do AV. We still get the occasional airplane falling out of the sky due to an implementation bug or unanticipated edge case that causes the software to choke... but overall software makes airplanes safer, and cars safer.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
