> the robotaxi company has acknowledged the death but stopped short of claiming responsibility
Which is probably accurate, cats are notorious for darting into traffic, and in this case the cat ran under the car while it was pulling away. While I would like autonomous vehicles to be better than us, the responsibility lies in the store owner who let their cat play in the street
Jk, I think my family alone had about 5 animals die to humans driving cars. (Very rural area with a mostly quiet road. A number of these were stray cats, can’t really control where they go.)
“Kill a Waymo! Save a cat“ Kill a human save a cat? The outrage is misdirected
Incredibly, you're underestimating the computational power of both autonomous vehicles and human brains. A modern smartphone is more than 2000x the Apollo Guidance computer. A Waymo is significantly more powerful than that. A human brain is tens of trillions of times more powerful than the AGC, assuming somewhat low estimates.
How does that help seeing under the chassis/wheels?
That extra power might mean seeing something move in your peripheral vision, intuit that it might be a cat, predict its path in space, and that it may have put itself under the car because that’s something cats usually do. The LiDar achieves nothing compared to this.
Which is probably accurate, cats are notorious for darting into traffic, and in this case the cat ran under the car while it was pulling away. While I would like autonomous vehicles to be better than us, the responsibility lies in the store owner who let their cat play in the street