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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Meh, everyone knew they couldn’t do it. The sensor array is too limited and they’re leaning too much on ML.

A human could drive the car with just the sensor input so in a very real way this is not correct. I agree that Tesla still has a long way to go though.

With just the low dynamic range fixed framerate monocular camera input? I’m not sure I could. Also, everyone knows computers still aren’t as good at vision recognition as humans are.

The difference is that human can do true inference, whereas that's not really attainable even with the best in class ML models. So until we make breakthroughs in AI reasoning, we still need aides like LIDAR in order to workaround current limitations.

What does true inference mean?

If I see a motorcycle go behind a billboard and not come out, I can reason that there is a motorcycle behind a billboard. I assume that's what they mean.

Maybe ML researchers should try growing a live, organic human brain in the lab, rather than writing code.

Inb4 Dr. Frankenstein was the first ML pioneer.

Humans can do a lot of things computers cannot do. Computers can do a lot of things humans cannot do.

> Meh, everyone knew they couldn’t do it.

The everyone you hear from is very different from the everyone I hear from. I dislike Tesla's approach, but you have to admit that a ton of people are on board their hype train.

Ive seen lots of people excited about tesla stock. Some people who were already fans of their car seemed to buy into the hype but I haven’t heard any non-fanboy who has paid any attention to self driving say they expected this to work out.

The problem is that most people are not paying huge attention to self-driving and the marketing will end up causing some people to misjudge the capabilities and get them killed. At which point fanboys will move the goalposts to "it kills less people than humans operating cars", which I don't think is necessarily true depending on how you want to measure that.

Unfortunately, many people treat Tesla auto-pilot and Waymo's Driver as though they were similar, when Waymo is probably 10x more capable, reliable, robust. I see this as similar to how people equate Alexa and Siri simple voice commands to Google Assistant's deep knowledge.

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