What I find mindbogglingly ridiculous is how emotionally charged all of the "the system must include LIDAR" proponents are. It seems to suggest otherwise is perceived as nothing but a coldly calculated cost cutting measure. None of the arguments I come up against are anything but a surface level "well duh, intuitively more sensors equals more better" along with a litany of "you must like murdering babies".

We do not have autonomous systems that can deal with the kinds of problems that human drivers currently deal with, which as I illustrated, is an infinity of embodied problems based on the entirety of our lives spent interacting with our physical environment.

My intuitions tell me that in order to have a machine that can make human-like decisions that it needs to have that exact same kind of embodied experience, that is to have interacted with the physical environment in the same manner as a human, which suggests to me that perhaps an android is the way forward. Then once the autonomous system is extracted from the android and placed in a car it can be further trained on additional sensors, like how a human driver can take the input of LIDAR.