Question: how much of current self-driving car tech counts as AI? My understanding is that it's pretty much just sophisticated telemetry and complex rulebooks.
Elaborating now that I'm not half-asleep, AI algorithms are either automating logical inference or automating statistical inference or a mixture. You can call a spam filter AI if you want and no one will call you on it, but it's just boring old hypothesis testing if you do what it does with pencil and paper. Likewise self-driving cars aren't different in kind from missile guidance systems, they can just do more because we have better computers. AI is more who you studied with, how you want to think about the problems you're solving and, less benignly, how the marketing people want to talk about the problems you're solving than a distinct kind of technology.
I'm not entirely sure how to answer that, but if you wikipedia Kalman Filter and follow along you're a couple of months from following Sebastien Thrun's book and the rest depends on which side of the "DARPA got us this far" and "google has hookers and blow" you fall on.