The road environment is designed for people to see and understand. Without a human-emulating "general AI", it's unlikely that every sign and surface marking out there will be legible to a machine. IMO, the whole premise of training these machines to see roads like a human is flawed. Their developers should be working with government agencies (like the FHWA in the US) to create new standards that are aware of the capabilities of the machine.
I agree and I think the whole self driving push should be incremental anyway:
1. To begin with it is only used on motorways/highways as they are long straight roads, where the AI can take over the boring part and the driver can be left to take over if something complex happens.
2. Shared AI maps across all cars that can route everyone to/from work. As this is shared, it can balance the load and result in the least amount of traffic jams. Humans still do the driving.
3. The government sets up AI cameras that monitor city routes, and cars can tap into this information as they drive. The benefit here would be seeing the road from all angles, as well as massive computers bigger than cars doing all the number crunching. Over time more and more city routes could become approved to be fully driven by AI.
That's my approach to an incremental design at least.
So before transportation there were no roads, then Humans begun using animals and the roads were formed to accommodate animal based transport.
Then Animal powered mechanical transport(carriages) was invented and people made roads to accommodate the new means of transport.
Then the fully mechanical transport came and we just made roads for these machines.
For some reason, this time Humans are trying to keep the roads the same. Well, actually not,
there are project to create roads designed for self driving vehicles.
I think those in the software industry have a hammer and now see everything as a nail. What a successful AI transportation system would be? Probably based on specifically designed infrastructure that is using the AI tech that never worked for the old school roads.
The machine evolves too quickly right now for standards to be worth it. Let the craze die down before doing something like that.
Even if we intentionally supported machine drivers with special signs, beacons, or other things, those are still going to be subject to interference and defacing.
