Sensation without perception: The white whale effect and perceptual blindness in autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) use sensors that exceed human capabilities in resolution and reaction speed, yet a catastrophic failure mode persists: the inability to detect massive, white obstacles (such as semi-trailers) against bright skies. Although engineering analyses attribute these accidents to sensor dynamic range or radar filtration errors, we argue they represent a fundamental failure of perceptual organization. We propose the term "white whale effect" to describe a form of machine visual blindness where high-luminance objects are misclassified as ambient background because of failures in lightness anchoring, figure-ground segregation, and global motion perception. We conclude that safer AV perception requires moving beyond pixel-level classification to architectures constrained by the principles of psychophysics.