AI has gotten really good but will it ever develop the necessary imagination to be able to handle all edge cases? If we ever do reach that point, we should require all cars to be AI-driven only so that bad drivers don’t injure themselves or others when they get into these kinds of situations. Until then, something needs to be done before too many people kill themselves by thinking that autonomous cars are more capable than they actually are.
I'm sure it will never be perfect. But i think at the very, very least, we should be well passed the point of never hitting heavy, stationary objects in the middle of the road assuming sufficient stopping distance.
The problem is that the AI is held to an impossible standard of near perfection, yet we happily accept that human drivers kill themselves and others in droves.
The right question is whether self driving is better than the human driver.
If Tesla used Lidar for their emergency braking I doubt they'd be driving straight into stationary objects. But Elon is adamantly against Lidar and wants vision only.
Then again, other car companies have emergency braking without Lidar (just radar/camera like Tesla) that doesn't seem to crash into stationary objects, so it sounds like Tesla's software is just not as good at emergency braking.
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