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‘LiDAR is lame’: why Elon Musk’s vision for a self-driving Tesla taxi faltered
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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When Autopilot started I would hear people joke about how it couldn't drive in bad weather where people could. They seem to miss the point that when the computer begins to lose information needed to navigate, it's going to stop driving. People lose information and they keep going. One of these is safer.
Of course if Elon had thrown everything at the car to make it have information even in terrible or odd conditions, there'd be more merit in claiming those cars are safer than humans. But between genius brain (however much there is) and narcissist, the latter won out in doing it his way because others were doing it the obvious way.
The safest roads would be fully automated and tapped into each other. We wouldn't even need lights at intersections. A hybrid mix of human/computer traffic is always going to be dangerous.
There's also the point that, while AI has gotten quite far, the human brain is still fairly superior at accurately interpolating and interpreting limited information. This may have changed in the past year or two, but my impression is that humans are still far better than machines at handling new or "corrupted" information, like driving in poor visibility, or suddenly having road markings disappear, etc.
Except:
Your points illustrate why other means besides cameras should be also used, as well as why the human brain's ability to filter or even ignore things is a bonus to our driving ability. Or a detriment. People who power through bad weather or sun glare or any other obstacles that obscure them seeing well and manage to get through aren't greater than the computer driver, they're just lucky. Same can be said for all the people driving while on the phone, they aren't skilled in multitasking while moving hundreds of feet per second, they just happen to have it clear 99% of the time so think they're that good.
The main point was that computers need all the information they can get to compete with humans, but they also have the ability to get data we cannot, and it's stupid to not give them that ability because of some desire to simulate the full (read that as limited) human experience. Humans deal with less info all the time, but that doesn't make them better.
If you make a road safe enough you end up with trains.
Indeed. We might have gone that way. Lots of larger cities had rail for their public transit, but the car industry got that removed for obvious reasons.
Agreed.
I hate trump and Musk and I morn the world we could have if it weren't for people like them. However... after the election the only bit of hope that I - and which I knew would never happen - was that maybe they would use their authoritarianism to make the very hard decisions that could lead to a better society, such as phasing out human operated vehicles on public roads in favor of interconnected, self-driving vehicles. We have the technology to do so many amazing things... there just isn't enough profit to bribe the politicians, pay the executives and build it to make it worth while.
Benevolent dictators almost always happen only in fiction, and they don't last. I guess you can get some that do a few good things while being bad overall.
Oh, I know, and I know it was an absolute dumb thing to even think would be in the realm of possibility, but I was just trying to find something, anything to grab on to and help keep my hope on the ventilator.
The best I'm hoping for now is that trump will do something good on accident, like how he legalized thc in 2018. Sure, he did it in the stupidest way possible, but it's something.
Random drunk walk is sometimes successful in the results. The bonus is that it also prevents some malevolent actions from succeeding.