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Comment by bluthru | Hacker News Reader

>Or even avoid a pothole.

Humans can avoid potholes with one eye. I don't know why you assume LiDAR is a requirement for this.

One eye backed by millions of years of training in depth perception and object recognition... The argument that humans are able to drive with just two cameras and software (brain) is deeply flawed because the brain is highly advanced in areas necessary for driving and Tesla's claim it will replicate that any time soon is absurd. This is why you need additional sensors like LIDAR to alleviate the computational load.

The human brain is a hard AI entity that can think through problems in any generic situation.

In self driving AI you are programming the car to do a specific thing. Sooner or later you will run into a situation in which algorithm will panic and can't do much.

Humans cannot and do not "think through problems in any generic situation", and specifically when it comes to driving, they fail with fatal consequences about 100 times every single day in the U.S. alone. Applying such unreasonably high standards (i.e., algorithms that never fail) before we allow self-driving technology to be deployed actually kills people.

I am not convinced Kamaal was arguing against self driving cars. He might have been arguing that they could be simpler and more achievable. It could be just fine as long as when the software panics it does something sane like slow to a controlled stop and turn on the hazard lights.

If only the brain would be smart enough to focus on driving instead of distractions...

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