Well, that's just a clever PR lipservice move. They couldn't win the contract because they didn't have the ability to, so rather than failing embarrassingly, they blamed their exit on their brand-new AI principles to make themselves look good. This was the consensus on HN at the time.
I lived in Florida, and recall hearing that much of the state is actually below sea level. I saw some forests, but much of the state is swamp, or former swamps that were drained for suburbia.
> Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” ...
This kind of comment is a disservice to all the engineers who actually figured it out. Elon Musk is certainly a visionary and a financier, but is not a 1000x engineer/mathematician who did all the work himself
Yes, it was very incremental. They even sent the orbiter around the moon on a mission before even attempting to land. And there were a number of other tests (manned and unmanned), and even ones without an official Apollo designation.
As you described, the default is to yield, and so the vehicle can always yield and signal its intention to do so by breaking slowly. And I agree, there may not always be a sign (a storm or driver could knock it over), so the default should always be to yield.
The iPhone already does safety, weather, and police notifications by default, and you have to opt-out. This is essentially the same thing, but users have to opt-in.