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The big missing piece is not LIDAR, but causal reasoning. Autopilot and similar 'AI' cannot reason; it doesn't have a mental model to ponder 'what if' and can't use counter-factuals to ponder what would happen if it didn't do something. It's just glorified pattern matching currently.

Reading Judea Pearl's The Book Of Why certainly sobered my outlook on AI.

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Well, that's not necessarily true... self driving in particular usually uses planning, which is basically all about 'what if'. But it's true this is relevant to AI in general.

Isn't that more of an indictment of the self-driving industry as a whole? In Tesla's case they are missing that, but they are also missing LIDAR (or some other thing to fill in that technological gap).

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