Something like half your human brain is devoted to visual processing.
There's a tendency to think that things like language is what makes the human brain special, or our ability to plan or think abstractly, and we talk about things like "eagle eyes", but the truth is humans are seeing machines with most everything else as an afterthought.
The reason your cat will attack paint spots on glass for hours and flips the hell out about laser pointers is because their visual systems are too simple to distinguish between those and the objects that actually interest them, like insects.
Vision is not the easy part of AI.
I think it is, actually. Going from raw pixels to objects is the (relatively speaking) easy part. It's the next part (using that for planning and common-sense reasoning) that's the hard part. Machine learning has already advanced past humans in this regard for many classes of problems - which is part of the reason why captchas are getting so hard.
This was several years ago, hence the move away from obfuscated text (which was getting harder and harder to read): https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/...
I'd be surprised if basic perception tasks as human-ness tests last more than a few more years.
It probably made a lot of sense in the Southern California design center. In Upstate New York, that camera is covered in road spray and salt, and my brain cannot see anything or act effectively without cleaning it. Even after doing that, it will get dirty again after a few minutes of driving.
I’d guess that a least a few dozen people will hurt by this decision.
Take this problem to the self-driving car and things get even worse. You’re going to have a lot of problems with sensor effectiveness that cannot be magically fixed with software.
I was waiting for my bus to work one morning after a large snowfall. The snow clearing crews were hard at work, but the street was effectively blocked by piles of snow, men, and machines.
Yet, my bus arrived on time *driving down the sidewalk".
I am not sure how any self-driving system could have figured that out :)