Yeah, Tesla may fail to ship a safe LIDAR-less car.
But the problem of making a self-driving car without LIDAR or something equivalent is awesomely challenging! An I bet Andrej Karpathy will really enjoy working on it.
And the tech resulting from this line of work will surely find its way in other things. (I guess the military has wet dreams about this stuff... I mean, even "unsafeness" can become a "feature" here: "uhm, look, that school we blew up by, uhm, mistake... was an AI-error... like... these stuff happens, you know, even Tesla's cars have an accident from time to time, that's life". Well, those dreams could also be nightmares: basically any "self driving thingie" is a potential guided missile, and dirt-cheap-because-lidar-less stuff has the potential of becoming ubiquitous, and unmaintained/unupdated/unsecured/hackable, leading to nightmarish urban warfare scenarios...)
And: "People will die because of this."... Uhm, yeah, they will, but if people ain't dying it means research is not moving fast enough, and competition will overtake you. I'd be more worried about when this stuff will be deployed on buses with tens of people, but hopefully public transport would stay a safe decade behind bleeding-edge stuff :)
And about and Tesla: however this plays out, Elon Musk made quite a lot of what would've been technically considered "bad business decisions" and things turned up OK so far... so I wouldn't feel sorry for them or short their stock ;)
But the problem of making a self-driving car without LIDAR or something equivalent is awesomely challenging! An I bet Andrej Karpathy will really enjoy working on it.
And the tech resulting from this line of work will surely find its way in other things. (I guess the military has wet dreams about this stuff... I mean, even "unsafeness" can become a "feature" here: "uhm, look, that school we blew up by, uhm, mistake... was an AI-error... like... these stuff happens, you know, even Tesla's cars have an accident from time to time, that's life". Well, those dreams could also be nightmares: basically any "self driving thingie" is a potential guided missile, and dirt-cheap-because-lidar-less stuff has the potential of becoming ubiquitous, and unmaintained/unupdated/unsecured/hackable, leading to nightmarish urban warfare scenarios...)
And: "People will die because of this."... Uhm, yeah, they will, but if people ain't dying it means research is not moving fast enough, and competition will overtake you. I'd be more worried about when this stuff will be deployed on buses with tens of people, but hopefully public transport would stay a safe decade behind bleeding-edge stuff :)
And about and Tesla: however this plays out, Elon Musk made quite a lot of what would've been technically considered "bad business decisions" and things turned up OK so far... so I wouldn't feel sorry for them or short their stock ;)