I was always curious about this, it's impossible to find any safety certifications or details about the lidars used by e.g. Waymo. Are we supposed to just trust that they didn't cut corners, especially given the financial incentives to convince people that lidar is necessary (because there's a notable competitor that doesn't use it).
To date most class-1 lasers have also been hidden/enclosed I think (and there is class 1M for limited medical use), so I'm not convinced that the limits for long-term daily exposure have been properly studied.
Until I see 3rd party studies otherwise, I plan to treat vehicle lidar no different than laser pointers and avoid looking directly at them. If/when cars become common enough that this is too hard to do, maybe I'll purchase NIR blocking glasses (though most ones I found have an ugly green tint, I wonder if it's possible to make the frequency cutoff sharp enough that it doesn't filter out visible reds).
Every day dozens of Waymos are in close proximity to the people cleaning them and plugging them in, and they are maneuvering in tight spaces amongst other Waymos. That's not a peer reviewed study, but it seems to work.
The visual system can patch over tiny defects (see: blindspot) and visual field tests have not been part of standard yearly eye exams I've been to. And possible longer-term risks (say increased risk of cataracts) would be harder to conclusively show. And the sample size involved would skew heavily towards young healthy adults instead of people with pre-existing eye conditions.
I realize it's not easily possible to prove the negative, but when you're exposing the public the burden must be on the company to be transparent and rigorous. And from what I see it's difficult to even find certification documents for the lidars used in commercial self-driving vehicles, possibly because everything is proprietary and trade secret.
That's a possibility. Google appears to be contracting out depot work to car rental companies because a Waymo depot is basically a car rental lot. They need three shifts for each depot. So there's probably a couple hundred people who would otherwise be cleaning out rental cars working the depots. At some point injuries would get hard to sweep under the rug.
To date most class-1 lasers have also been hidden/enclosed I think (and there is class 1M for limited medical use), so I'm not convinced that the limits for long-term daily exposure have been properly studied.
Until I see 3rd party studies otherwise, I plan to treat vehicle lidar no different than laser pointers and avoid looking directly at them. If/when cars become common enough that this is too hard to do, maybe I'll purchase NIR blocking glasses (though most ones I found have an ugly green tint, I wonder if it's possible to make the frequency cutoff sharp enough that it doesn't filter out visible reds).