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Comment by rpedela | Hacker News Reader

The human visual cortex is still far more advanced than a computer's. Maybe that will change some day, but asking about non-camera sensing equipment is a reasonable question until it does.

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Sure, and it's not only cortex. Humans also know a lot about the world, and can predict things much better. There are areas in which humans are limited, however, such as reaction time, spectral sensitivity, the fact that humans can only see well in the center of where they're looking at and fake the rest of their visual field, etc. It's not at all clear to me that a human pair of eyeballs is better than 8 high quality, wide spectrum cameras feeding into the system at once.

That said, I think it's disingenuous of Tesla to call their system "autopilot" or imply autonomy of any kind when talking about their system. I will call something autopilot when it can drive me from door to door without me touching the wheel, in less than friendly weather conditions. Not drive in a straight line where it never rains.

You can have a 1000 cameras and it still doesn't matter if you don't have a good computer to process the data. That is where machine learning, etc comes in. Machine learning is really starting to come into its own in last few years especially for image recognition but it still sucks compared to humans. That doesn't mean self-driving based on cameras isn't good enough but it needs to be proven and we aren't there yet.

Dude, I work on high performance machine learning and machine vision 12 hours a day. You don't need to tell me it sucks, I know. But it's superhuman on some tasks already, and in a few short years, it'll be superhuman on a few more, and little by little it'll get there. All you get from that lidar is a depth map. You can do that without a lidar, using two or more cameras. If you also interpolate across a series of predictions, and have sensor fusion (which Tesla does, they also use radars and ultrasonic sensors) you can even make it robust. Truly, people who say it can't be done should not interrupt people who are doing it.

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