Musk's Criticism Of Lidar And Simulation Training Belie The Correlative Nature Of Modern AI

Tesla's founder Elon Musk generated headlines once again this week with his criticism of the driverless car industry's reliance on Lidar sensors and simulation-based training. In Musk's view, Lidar is merely a crutch the industry has fallen onto rather than building more accurate AI, while simulation cannot compete with observing the chaotic and unpredictable realm of the real world. The problem with these sentiments, which Musk is far from the first to express, is that they belie the correlative nature of modern deep learning that lacks the causation models required for unassisted end-to-end learning from their environments. Why has Lidar become so dominate in the driverless car space? Perhaps the biggest reason is that it expresses the world in a way most familiar to navigation algorithms.