Most parts of the world look at McMansions and feel unsettled, particularly when they are marketed as "aspirational": sell your soul in order to get the biggest place you can get a mortgage for on your salary, so you can never leave your job.
The other benefit with having multiple projectors/lasers at different angles are that you can use different wavelengths: one that causes polymerisation, one that inhibits it.
> Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant capital
But this is the point: the reason Uber is successful isn't particularly because of their technical excellence or innovation, it's because they've used massive amounts of capital to very knowingly buy the market.
This is an example of one of the nefarious sides of capitalism -- a flaw -- not a celebration of how great it is at solving problems (which is genuinely is in a lot of circumstances).
If Uber didn't have as much capital, smaller distributed co-ops may well have prospered.
Fundamentally, if a human can drive a car with nothing but two relatively poor eyes with a pretty small field of vision set in a single location inside the vehicle, an AI can be trained to drive using the same inputs - any more sensors are a bonus.
The other thing people forget is the bar isn't that high: self driving vehicles don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans are. All of the "whatabout" edge cases people proffer as examples of areas an AI would have trouble with, people have trouble with too. The difference is that once an AI learns to solve that edge case, it doesn't have to relearn going forward.
The most extreme example of this I've seen is someone who constructed an entire town map in Excel. It was literally incredible.
And I'm not talking about a modern American city that's on a grid system, I'm talking about a 700 year old Cornish seaside town, with windy roads and odd shaped ancient buildings.
The amount of joined cells alone would have put off weaker men. I hate to think how many hours it took.
Just remember that the extra sensors are a "bonus": if a human being can successfully drive by just using their two eyes in the driving seat, with perhaps 200° range and a couple of mirrors, then an AI can be trained to do the same.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70420.The_Undercover_Eco...