Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash
I would like to add over here that Tesla does indeed do sensor fusion in their cars. Their Autopilot combines radar and ultrasound with vision to decide where to drive. Commentators bringing up LIDAR are jumping the gun by assuming that this scenario isn&#x27;t something that these sensors wouldn&#x27;t have detected in either combination or individually to spot the anomaly. The problem over here is likely to be software due to a bug in their code than a simple lack of additional sensors (LIDAR). And this touches on deeper issues that could have profound ramifications for the autonomous driving industry and the broader industry in general.<p>At least, in my eyes, the big problem with the autonomous car industry isn&#x27;t the sensor suites they are deploying (or not), but the over-reliance on neural networks. They are black boxes with failure modes that can&#x27;t be adequately mapped. See: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.evolvingai.org&#x2F;fooling" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.evolvingai.org&#x2F;fooling</a><p>What if the neural net or the system used to detect obstacles didn&#x27;t see it because the precise configuration of the data fooled it? And if that&#x27;s the case then what&#x27;s next? How do we decide when it is okay for safety-critical systems to be opaque? How do we deal with autonomous driving if the conclusion comes out to be a &quot;no&quot; for this case? How should broader society deal with a yes? And who decides all of this in the first place?<p>Possibilities like this scare me far more than the lack of LIDAR because replicating a bug like this would be next to impossible. We don&#x27;t know what we don&#x27;t know, and we can&#x27;t explore and understand the system to suss out what we don&#x27;t know.<p>Edit: Fleshed out the idea with more questions.