Geoff Manaugh’s latest looks at ScanLAB’s project to explore the bits of cityscape that LiDAR technology is making visible to robotic cars. Things humans overlook suddenly become visible (and dangerous):

Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the book “Robot Futures,” uses the metaphor of the perfect storm to describe an event so strange that no amount of programming or image-­recognition technology can be expected to understand it. Imagine someone wearing a T-­shirt with a stop sign printed on it, he told me. “If they’re outside walking, and the sun is at...