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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

In particular, I find this claim questionable: "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware." https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

As you mention, this is trivially true on the level of the sensors. We know cameras are enough because human brains can do it with eyes (biological cameras).

But there is no evidence that we know how to write software for the processing part of it (to an acceptable degree of safety) with cameras only, nor that the computing power on-board is up to the task.

How can you say that hardware package X is sufficient to implement something that has literally never been done before?

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>this is trivially true on the level of the sensors.

Maybe. The human eye is fundamentally different than cameras in terms of how it focuses on things. For similar performance, we may need much higher resolution cameras. We don't know.

Interesting, I wasn't aware. How are they different?

Eyes don't have uniform resolution. The centers of our eyes (or what we're focusing on) have very, very high resolution, while the outer parts have much lower. Cameras normally have something like a middling resolution in comparison.

Eyes doesn't send the entire picture to the brain at once at a constant sampling rate either, they work more like event cameras [0]. Combine this with micro movements of the eye, and specialized brain structures and it's not as easy as saying that because we only need two eyes, robots only need two cameras. Sure, stereo vision might be enough, but what kind of cameras, and what kind of computers do we need to reach feature parity with our own sight?

[0] http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/iros15workshop/papers/IROS2015-WASR...

Apart from this, our brains (actually brains of all things that have to hunt/be hunted) are extremely good at detecting motion, especially at the peripherals. This makes us extremely good at detecting stuff like a pedestrian who is about to cross the road, or an incoming vehicle from a junction...

I mean, we could be focusing 100% on the road ahead, and can still respond to peripheral events lightning fast..

I think this is why a lack of sleep can quite adversely affect driving. It seems that if you haven't slept well. the "behind the scene" processing takes a hit, which greatly impacts driving capability..

"All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware at 5mph."

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