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Comment by littlemtman | Hacker News Reader

I dont need LIDAR for it. It is very expensive and doesnt have a lot of image points to train on, at least compared to images so 480p for example.

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Human drivers have less sensory capability than a machine driver can have, but we compensate with situational awareness from general intelligence.

For a machine, direct sensory knowledge of what's solid and how far away everything is has a lot more added value.

If the machine driver sees something it has little experience with, it can't reason about its properties, but if it knows it's a solid object in its path, it can take action in spite of that.

What's the alternative to LIDAR that is working?

Cameras, it works for humans

No. It’s intuition while you drive in snowstorm or heavy rain. Sane driver should pull over immediately and wait.

Source: driving fail videos and personal experience. I am really scared to drive slowly and safely during snowstorm, there is very real risk to be reared by some idiot flying twice the speed I drive.

In the end those are just mathematical models and not intelligence. Humans interact based off on their experience and it is really hard to find training data with a snow storm.

Humans have a deep and subtle mental model of How The World Works. Programs, even ones with 'deep learning', don't have that. Their understanding is actually fairly shallow, which is why it can be very useful to compensate for this using sensor equipment with superhuman capabilities.

Yes currently those models are just specialised in some special thing. If there really was a model that could understand the world like a human - well that would be artificial general intelligence

Don't 1.2M humans die in human-driven car accidents per year? And 20-50M suffer injuries?

Good enough for humans is one thing, but the promise of self-driving automobiles is that they're supposed to be able to be better than us and safer. Incorporating all the sensor data available shouldn't be looked down upon.

Also humans rely on hearing and tactile response data as well as vision when driving.

LIDAR is like a special version of the camera.

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