Ah we only need general intelligence, something so ineffable and hard to understand that we don't even have a clear definition of it.

Exposure adjustment is constrained by frame rate, that doesn't buy you very much dynamic range.

A system that replicates the human eye's rapid aperture adjustment and integration of images taken at quickly changing aperture/ filter settings is very much not what Tesla is putting in their cars.

But again, the argument is fine in principle. It's just that you can't buy a camera that performs like the human visual system today.

"adjustable exposure times and apertures"

That means that to view some things better, you have to accept being completely blind to others. That is not a substitute for dynamic range.

I trust Tesla's data on this kind of stuff only as far as a Starship can travel on its return trip to Mars. Anything coming from Elon would have to be audited by an independent entity for me to give it an ounce of credence.

Generally you are comparing Apples and Oranges if you are comparing the safety records of i.e. Waymos to that of the general driving population.

Waymos drive under incredibly favorable circumstances. They also will simply stop or fall back on human intervention if they don't know what to do – failing in their fundamental purpose of driving from point A to point B. To actually get comparable data, you'd have to let Waymos or Teslas do the same type of drives that human drivers do, under the same curcumstances and without the option of simply stopping when they are unsure, which they simply are not capable of doing at the moment.

That doesn't mean that this type of technology is useless. Modern self-driving and adjacent tech can make human drivers much safer. I imagine, it would be quite easy to build some AI tech that has a decent success rate in recognizing inebriated drivers and stopping the cars until they have talked to a human to get cleared for driving. I personally love intelligent lane and distance assistance technology (if done well, which Tesla doesn't in my view). Cameras and other assistive technology are incredibly useful when parking even small cars and I'd enjoy letting a computer do every parking maneuver autonomously until the end of my days. The list could go on.

Waymos have cumulatively driven about 100 million miles without a safety driver as of July 2025 (https://fifthlevelconsulting.com/waymos-100-million-autonomo...) over a span of about 5 years. This is such a tiny fraction of miles driven by US (not to speak of worldwide) drivers during that time, that it can't usefully be expressed. And they've driven these miles under some of the most favorable conditions available to current self-driving technology (completely mapped areas, reliable and stable good weather, mostly slow, inner city driving, etc.). And Waymo themselves have repeatedly said that overcoming the limitations of their tech will be incredibly hard and not guaranteed.

Do you have independent studies to back up your assertion that they are safer per distance than a human driver?

They data indicated they hold an edge over drunk and incapacitated humans, not humans.

> A top tier human driver in the top shape outperforms this generation of car AIs.

Most non-impaired humans outperform the current gen. The study I saw had FSD at 10x fatalities per mile vs non-impaired drivers.

Maybe watch the rest of the video. The Tesla, unlike the LiDAR car, also failed the fog and rain tests. The mural was just the last and funniest one.

Let’s also not forget murals like that do exist in real life. And those aren’t foam.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

Additionally, as the other commenter pointed out, trucks often have murals painted on them, either as art or adverts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_art_in_South_Asia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekotora

Search for “truck ads” and you’ll find a myriad companies offering the service.

I've seen semi trucks with scenic views painted on them, both rear and side panels.

What's more is, the power of depth perception in binocular vision is a function of distance between two cameras. The larger that distance is, the further out depth can be estimated.

Human skull only has two eyesockets, and it can only get this wide. But cars can carry a lot of cameras, and maintain a large fixed distance between them.

if additional sensors improve the ai, then your last statement is categorically untrue. The reason it worked better is that those additional sensors gave it information that wac not available in the video stream

Multiple things can be true at the same time you realize. Some problems, such as insufficient AI can have a larger effect on safety, but more data to work with as well as train on always wins. You want lidar.

You keep insisting that cameras are good enough, but it’s empirically possible since safe autonomous driving AI has not been achieved yet to say that cameras alone collect enough data.

The minimum setup without lidar would be cameras, radar, ultrasonic, GPS/GNSS + IMU.

Redundancy is key. With lidar, multiple sensors cover each other’s weaknesses. If LiDAR is blinded by fog, radar steps in.

I’m a bit confused. If we’re talking about consumer cars, the end goal is not to rent a car that can drive itself, the end goal is to own a car that can drive itself, and so it doesn’t matter if the car is available for purchase but costs $250,000 because few consumers can afford that, even wealthy ones.

> I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high.

Yes, and?

My reference example was two aircraft carriers and 1:1 models of some fictional spacecraft larger than some islands, as personal private residences.

> To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.

Incorrect.

Currently, about 83e6 hectares of this planet is currently a "built up area".

4827e6 ha, about 179 times the currently "built up" area, is cropland and grazing land. Such land can produce much more food than it already does, the limiting factor is the cost of labour to build e.g. irrigation and greenhouses (indeed, this would also allow production in what are currently salt flats and deserts, and enable aquaculture for a broad range of staples); as I am suggesting unbounded robot labour is already a requirement for UBI, this unlocks a great deal of land that is not currently available.

The only scenario in which I believe UBI works is one where robotic labour gives us our wealth. This scenario is one in which literally everyone can get their own personal 136.4 meters side length approximately square patch. That's not per family, that's per person. Put whatever you want on it — an orchard, a decorative garden, a hobbit hole, a castle, and five Olympic-sized swimming pools if you like, because you could fit all of them together at the same time on a patch that big.

The ratio (and consequently land per person), would be even bigger if I didn't disregard currently unusable land (such as mountains, deserts, glaciers, although of these three only glaciers would still be unusable in the scenario), and also if I didn't disregard land which is currently simply unused but still quite habitable e.g. forests (4000e6 ha) and scrub (1400e6 ha).

In the absence of future tech, we get what we saw in the UK with "council housing", but even this is still not as you say. While it gets us cheap mediocre tower blocks, it also gets us semi-detached houses with their own gardens, and even the most mediocre of the widely disliked Brutalist architecture era of the UK this policy didn't create a new underclass, it provided homes for the existing underclass. Finally, even at the low end they largely (but not universally) were an improvement on what came before them, and this era came to an end with a government policy to sell those exact same homes cheaply to their existing occupants.

I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving. The main plus point is it doesn't do means testing. The second plus point is if you really hate your job, you can quit without starving. This means we can avoid coworkers who really would like to not be there.

I think it is a solid idea. I don't know how it fits in the broader scheme of things though. If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low?

From wikipedia:

> a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e., without a means test or need to perform work.

It doesn't say you aren't allowed to work for more money. My understanding is you can still work as much as you want. You don't have to to get this payment. And you won't be penalized for making too much money.

> the resources (building materials) and the energy to power the robots or whatever, will be more expensive and tightly controlled than ever.

I am also concerned about this possibility, but come at it from a more near-term problem.

I think there is a massive danger area with energy prices specifically, in the immediate run-up to AI being able to economically replace human labour.

Consider a hypothetical AI which, on performance metrics, is good enough, but is also too expensive to actually use — running it exceeds the cost of any human. The corollary is that whatever that threshold is, under the assumption of rational economics, no human can ever earn more than whatever it costs to run that AI. As time goes on, if the hardware of software improves, the threshold comes down.

Consider what the world looks like if the energy required to run a human-level AI at human-level speed costs the same as the $200/month that OpenAI charges for access to ChatGPT Pro (we don't need to consider what energy costs per kWh for this, prices may change radically as we reach this point).

Conditional on this AI actually being good enough at everything (really good enough, not just "we've run out of easily tested metrics to optimise"), then this becomes the maximum that a human can earn.

If a human is earning this much per month, can they themselves afford energy to keep their lights on, their phone charged, their refrigerator running?

Domestic PV systems (or even wind/hydro if you're lucky enough to be somewhere where that's possible) will help defend against this; personal gasoline/diesel won't, the fuel will be subject to the same price issues.

> Power and wealth simply wont allow everything to be accessible to everyone. The idea that people would be able to build enormous mansions (or personal aircraft carriers or spaceships) just sounds rather absurd, no offense, but come on.

While I get your point, I think a lot of the people in charge can't really imagine this kind of transformation. Even when they themselves are trying to sell the idea. Consider what Musk and Zuckerberg say about Mars and superintelligence respectively — either they don't actually believe the words leaving their mouths (and Musk has certainly been accused of this with Mars), or they have negligible imagination as to the consequences of the world they're trying to create (which IMO definitely describes Musk).

At the same time, "absurd"?

I grew up with a C64 where video games were still quite often text adventures, not real-time nearly-photographic 3D.

We had 6 digit phone numbers, calling the next town along needed an area code and cost more; the idea we'd have video calls that only cost about 1USD per minute was sci-fi when I was young, while the actual reality today is that video calls being free to anyone on the planet isn't even a differentiating factor between providers.

I just about remember dot-matrix printers, now I've got a 3D printer that's faster than going to the shops when I want one specific item.

Universal translation was a contrivance to make watching SciFi easier, not something in your pocket that works slightly better for images than audio, and even then because speech recognition in natural environments turned out to be harder than OCR in natural environments.

I'm not saying any of this will be easy, I don't know when it will be good enough to be economical — people have known how to make flying cars since 1936*, but they've been persistently too expensive to bother. AGI being theoretically possible doesn't mean we ourselves are both smart enough and long-lived enough as an advanced industrialised species to actually create it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogiro_Company_of_America_AC...

> No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism

I'd be very interested in hearing which definition of "socialism" aligns with those obviously libertarian views?

> If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery [...] Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions.

Indulging in the benefits of living in a society, knowingly breaking its laws, being appalled by entirely predictable consequences of those action, and finally resorting to incorrect usage of emotional language like "slavery" and "robbery" to deflect personal responsibility is childish.

Taxation is payment in exchange for services provided by the state and your opinion (or ignorance) of those services doesn't make it "robbery" nor "slavery". Your continued participation in society is entirely voluntary and you're free to move to a more ideologically suitable destination at any time.

Good idea, lets make taxes optional or non enforceable. What comes next. Oh right, nobody pays. The 'government' you have collapses and then strong men become warlords and set up fiefdoms that fight each other. Eventually some authoritarian gathers up enough power to unite everyone by force and you have your totalitarian system you didn't want, after a bunch of violence you didn't want.

We assume you're libertarian because you are spouting libertarian ideas that just don't work in reality.

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> the economic situation in Europe is much more dire than the US...

Is it, though? The US reports by far the highest levels of lifetime literal homelessness, which is three times greater than in countries like Germany. Homeless people on Europe aren't denied access to free healthcare, primary or even tertiary.

Why do you think the US, in spite of it's GDP, features so low in rankings such as human development index or quality of life?

Yet people live better. Goes to show you shouldn't optimise for crude, raw GDP as an end in itself, only as a means for your true end: health, quality of life, freedom, etc.

Several US states have the life expectancy of Bangladesh.

When was the last the techno-industrialist elite class said "what we have is enough"?

In this scenario, the marginal cost of taking everything else over is almost zero. Just tell the AI you want it taken over and it handles it. You'd take it over just for risk mitigation, even if you don't "need" it. Better to control it since it's free to do so.

Allowing a competing human economy is resources left on the table. And control of resources is the only lever of power left when labour is basically free.

> Maybe some ecological argument

There's a political angle too. 7 (or however many it will be) billion humans free to do their own thing is a risky free variable.