alt Hacker NewsThe reasoning is cynical but sound. If the system uses only the sensing modes people have, it will make the mistakes people do. If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win. It doesn't matter if your system has fewer accidents if some of the failure modes are different than human ones, because the jury will think "how could it not figure that out?"
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Until a lawyer points out other cars see that. My car already has various sensors and in manual driving sounds alarms if there is a danger I seem not to have noticed. (There are false alarms - but most of the type I did notice and probably should have left more safety margin even though I wouldn't hit it)
also regulators gather srastics and if cars with something do better they will mandate it.
Very recent issue with Waymo https://dmnews.co.uk/waymo-robotaxi-spotted-unable-to-cross-.... This is 17 years after they bet the farm on LIDAR, with no signs its ever going to be cost effective or that it's better than multiple cameras, with millisecond reaction 360 degrees, that never gets tired, drunk, distracted, and also has other cheaper sensors and NN trained on Billions or real world data.
IIUC, the cameras in a Tesla have worse vision (resolution) at far distances than a human. So while in the abstract your argument sounds fine; it'll crumble in court when a lawyer points out a similar driver would've needed corrective lens.
It is sound to think that cameras plus an accelerometer, plus data about about the car and environment (that you get from your ears) ought to be able to mimic and improve on human driving. However humans general purpose spatial awareness and ability to integrate all kinds of general information is probably really hard to replicate. A human would realize that an orange fluid spilling across the road might be slippery, guess the way a person might travel from the way their eyes are pointing...
It may just be faster to make lidar cheap. And lidar can do things humans can't.
Most accidents happen because people are human, aren't paying attention, are inebriated, not experienced enough drivers, or reckless.
It's not fair to say that vision based models will "make the same mistakes people do" as >99% of the mistakes people make are avoidable if these issues were addressed. And a computer can easily address all those issues
This is a new and flawed rationale that I haven't heard before. Tesla cameras are worse (lower resolution, sensitivity, and dynamic range) than human eyes and don't have "ears" (microphones).
Pretty hard to do if your whole selling point is ‘better and safer than human’ however?
I don't think that's the reasoning.
The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes.
Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers.
Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your accidents look the same, so I don't think your logic is even internally sound.