I agree that they’ll be criticized either way, though it is debatable which would have the worst outcome.
That being said, the US was a major driving force for the creation of Israel, has armed and funded them since, and has protected Israel in the Security Council preventing any international check on their actions . So, most certainly, it was not the US’s problem to begin with, but given US foreign policy for the past 70 years it is inextricably linked to the problem now.
I’m sure you don’t mean to offend, but the phrase “whole civilized world” being used to describe just the US + parts of western Europe is questionable at the very best.
It has a lot to do with AI. Their systems use a lot of deep learning etc to recognize agents/obstacles on the road (perception), to infer how the agents will move in the future (prediction), and to generate trajectories for their car (motion planning). It definitely isn’t Artificial General Intelligence, but it is most certainly AI.
If by “brought about positive changes”, you mean that it’s allowed colonial powers to enrich themselves enormously while draining their colonies of wealth, leaving millions to starve and destabilizing regions for generations, then yes perhaps you’re right. The argument you used could be applied in exactly the same way to justify slavery. The positive changes here always favour the oppressor, never the oppressed.
Not a fan of Musk at all, but Lidar is quite expensive. A 64 line lidar with 100m+ range was about 30k+ a few years ago (not sure how prices have changed now). The long range lidar on the top of the Waymo car is probably even higher resolution than this. It’s likely that the sensor suite + compute platform on the waymo car costs way more than the actual Jaguar base vehicle itself, though waymo manufactures it’s own lidars. I think it would have been impossible to keep the costs of Teslas within the general public’s reach if they had done that. Of course, deploying a self driving/L2+ solution without this sensor fidelity is also questionable.
I agree that perception models will not be able deal with this well for a while. They are just not good enough at estimating depth information. That being said, a few other companies also attempted “vision-only” solutions. TuSimple (the autonomous trucking company) argued at some point that lidar didn’t offer enough range for their solution since semi trucks need a lot more time to slow down/react to events ahead because of their massive inertia.