Technology

Our eyes are not perfect organs so why pretend like they are? Our eyes fail us:

• when it’s too dark
• when it’s too bright
• when there’s fog
• when there’s too much rain and snow
• when there’s glare from the sun
• when there’s obstructions
• when there’s sensory overload
• when there’s something covering our eyes like dirt and mud
• when we can only see on the visible spectrum

Why wouldn’t we want more incoming data to account for these shortcomings? Optical-only vision-based solutions are incomplete because our eyes are incomplete. I can’t see that a car is stopped dead in the road 10 feet ahead of me in thick fog, but an advanced set of telemetry sensors can. My eyes are not better than the scores of technology we’ve built over the past few decades and I’ve been practicing with them for 46 years. Give me a helmet that includes LIDAR and infrared and night vision and sonar and telemetry from a satellite and GPS and weather tracking and god knows what else and I’ll be much less likely to rear end that car in the fog. We humans invent technology to make up for our shortcomings, so why go with the idea of “if it’s good enough for biological evolution it’s good enough for these multi-ton contraptions we have hurtling down highways next to each other several metres apart at 100 km per hour every second of every day?” It sounds ludicrous on its face. We can choke on a peanut because our swallow tube is the next to the breathing tube ffs. We can do better.

"LIDAR is so lame! Who needs to be able to accurately map their surroundings, when our cars can get confused by a shadow passing across one of their lenses, just like humans do? It's so much more efficient to be blinded by fog, or low light conditions."

• Moron Musk, for some reason.

With good integrated design, the LIDAR could be practically invisible. So weird to think the average person actually would care about the details of how something works, or maybe Elon Musk just literally cannot imagine a car that uses LIDAR without it having a big assembly on the roof.

Unless we figure out who would "personally" be liable when an accident happen we should not have any self driving cars on the street.

Right now if someone crash into my car I know who is liable.

If self driving car crash into my car, are you telling me to sue Tesla? Lol, as if that is feasible.

Always interesting to see the view of the degree of Elon Musk's involvement in his companies' decisions swing depending on whether the outcome is good or bad.

The company has not released information on whether, or how long, it has spent mapping out or testing the driverless technology on Austin’s streets.

That's being too nice, the CEO is clearly proud of not mapping cities, as seen in the tweets. The journalist should call it out explicitly. "They are probably not mapping as suggested by the CEO's public posts." That's not too much of a leap.

TIL Guardian reporters watch Diggnation.