They do have LIDAR. Any damage to the laser-transparent central part of the cylinder, a scratch or spray paint, renders it inoperative. The cost to replace a LIDAR unit is easily the revenue (not the profit) from 250 taxi trips. You can imagine these might be the target of vandalism or theft because there is no perceived human victim and nobody in the car.
Many people here on Hacker News are realizing that a significant part of their hard-earned skills are now available to anyone for a few cents of compute time.
Once these systems scale up to attention over long pieces of program text (instead of just a few thousand tokens) most of software development will be near minimum wage, almost skilled labor.
You didn't mind when taxi drivers became obsolete. "I'm not a taxi driver, so I don't care!" We'll see how you feel when your economic value approaches zero.
Today's transformer networks are the first hints of a technology that will replace humans completely for all purposes.
It's qualitatively different, like world-destroying atomic bombs versus the minor explosives that came before. This is not like a loom replacing hand-weaving. We're rapidly converging on a full replacement for the human mind.
These systems will not defeat you with guns like in Terminator. They will defeat you by commoditizing your mind and making your economic value zero.
Visual artists have already been replaced. It won't be long before we have transformers over token trees containing millions of tokens. We've reached a point where we understand how to make the machine manipulate concepts. It's all just vectors of numbers and dot products. Really.
Capitalism is a wonderful system. But when your mind has become a commodity your economic value will approach zero. I hope you're not expecting our capitalist society to coddle you when that day arrives. Perhaps you will do manual labor for the machines, but I doubt the value of human physical labor will last. So good luck.
I work with these systems all day, every day, and these new systems are qualitatively different. These new transformer systems have crossed a line and its easy to see how they will threaten human dignity. This technology crosses a line. It's like atomic weapons. This is the commoditization of the human mind.
For example, if we as a society refuse to use self-driving cars, we can make the industry unprofitable. Society says, "No, this is not the kind of product we want" and capitalism works to starve the harmful industry.