Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

Cameras lack depth perception, which the brain very cunningly provides for humans at no additional cost.

Humans do get very clunky and slow when that depth perception is taken away. One example is night vision goggles which basically just project a flat screen onto your eyeballs. Many people report that they become susceptible to tripping, falling, hitting objects, or just straight up walking into trees with NVGs, in part because the loss of depth perception takes such a toll on their brain that they can't adapt in time. It takes hours if not days to fully adapt to NVGs, and even then you can't operate as quickly as you can in daylight unless you practice consistently (think SWAT or Navy Seals type training).

It's actually comical in a way that we possess the technology to build robots that can operate heavy machinery and practically interpret the world the same way we do, but we still have to worry about people holding up plastic signs.

It makes me think that the first real wide scale self driving vehicle deployment will have to come from a nation state rather than a corporation; the easiest way to solve all of these problems is by putting heavy investments into smart road infrastructure such that the car depends on sensors embedded in the signs or the asphalt rather than any camera feed. A school bus could just have a transmitter to indicate whether its lights are on or not; construction workers could be given road signs that transmit similar signals or better yet use a portal to construct a virtual geofence around wherever the construction is happening before it begins. These are all easily solvable problems in today's world; what is missing is the political capital to invest in these solutions despite the insane ROI.

It's so easy all you have to do is shine lasers at their eyeballs and it bricks the car!

This is like saying that investing in asphalt is pointless when horses can walk on dirt or cobble. The fact of the matter is that building new public transport is monumentally expensive, but roads themselves already exist. Installing new sensors and beacons would certainly not be a cheap task, but the bulk of the work is already done and there's no reason why these new systems couldn't integrate with existing roads that humans drive on. You can imagine for example a speed limit sign with a QR code containing information for the car to read, or a stop light using a radio transmitter to indicate its state. This infrastructure has to be upgraded anyways; why not make it friendlier for computers to use it? The costs pay themselves when crashes and traffic jams go away.

> Cameras lack depth perception,

Cameras lack any perception; perception is a function of brains.

But a single camera with appropriate processing can provide a wide array of depth cues (stereoscopy adds more.)

> Many people report that they become susceptible to tripping, falling, hitting objects, or just straight up walking into trees with NVGs, in part because the loss of depth perception takes such a toll on their brain that they can't adapt in time.

While loss of depth cues plays some role here, a much bigger factor, AIUI, is the narrow field of view. “Panoramic” NVGs have around 100° horizontal and 40° vertical field of view (non-panoramic NVGs often have around a 40° horizontal FoV), people have around (with eye but not head movement) a 210° horizontal and 120° vertical field of view. Looking directly ahead with even panoramic NVGs as you normally would without them, you literally cannot see lots of things, especially tripping hazards, and objects to your sides that you might laterally move into to avoid the things you can see in front of you.