Humans do it really well with just two cameras. It's not a hardware problem; it is entirely software. Whether self driving is possible or not with current AI techniques is debatable, but we're not waiting on any advances in hardware to do it.
This is because we're totally unable to come up with a coherent model for why the emergent behavior occurs given the input data and NN training. We know how individual elements of the NN work, and we can describe how the training system works. But the whole notion of repeatedly letting perturbations in a control value or control values dictate the entirety of the performance of a system is nuts.
The only way to determine how a NN will perform in a given situation outside of the training set is to actually feed it the stimulus and check the outputs. Given the amount of stimulus that we as drivers routinely get, it's impossible to say with any degree of certainty that a self-driving car that is built on an NN classifying engine will accurately classify everything in all situations and lighting conditions, because it's impossible to feed it a training set large enough to encompass those situations.
That leaves the question of making a classifier that is better than humans. And whether an NN is better than a human depends very much on the situation. We could make some statistical arguments, but when you're gambling with peoples' lives here it becomes difficult to tolerate such arguments. It's easy to be blase about it until it's your child chasing a ball in front of an AV, at which point any discussion of the statistics is academic.
What makes this challenging is that there are more such scenarios that might occur than there are grains of sand, or stars in the universe.
Those teams end up thinking they did all the necessary work and then go test, just to find out that there's a new edge case. At Starsky we called it Safety Theatre
We don't fully know how the human hardware works either. Or rather, we don't fully know how the human hardware + software works.
FTFY. You can thank me later.
If you don't mind, I think I'm going to steal that quote. It makes a really good point very succinctly.
It's a pithy response that undermines the challenge of a problem nobody has been able to solve even with years of effort and billions of dollars.
As the OP said, "it's not a hardware problem," in that the quality or number of cameras, sensors, etc. isn't the bottleneck to solving this problem.
That level of resolution doesn't matter at all for driving. People can drive just as well through a video feed, like Starsky was doing. Yes general AI does not exist yet, but my point is simply that the parent made a comment about the need for hardware which is simply not true.
I can tell you from experience this is false. It usually works, but when it doesn't you're fucked. People wildly underestimate, by orders of magnitude, how many and how complicated the edge-cases are for self-driving.
Has Elon musk invented artificial general intelligence? If not, the point isn't a good one at all.