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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Because at this moment, the only thing we know can be as good as a human is a human.

That means the only thing we know can work is eyes + brain.

The answer to your question is: we don't know what's needed, so people saying "sorry you need LIDAR for FSD" is much more "drank the coolaid" than my stance of "we don't know, maybe no LIDAR + lots of training data can work just fine". Or, turn the question on its head – how much better at driving do you think humans would be if we had LIDAR on top of our heads? My guess is... not very. Hence my belief that the Tesla approach (less SOTA sensing, more training data) is a reasonable one.

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Your stance of "we don't know, maybe no LIDAR + lots of training data can work just fine" implies that a computer functions as well as a human brain, which as several other commenters have pointed out, is simply not true. I don't have a comment for you about LiDAR on top of humans heads, but I would bet that humans with one eye (and hence no depth perception) are worse at driving than humans with two eyes. There are also countless other sensors in your body that determine depth perception besides just your eyes - your entire nervous system is at play.

Since integrated LIDAR in humans is a bit hard to imagine, how about a human with 10 eyes? Will they be a 5x better driver?

You've still got things a bit mixed up. My stance does not imply that a computer functions as well as a human brain. I am not claiming that better sensors won't (eventually) give you better results. My stance merely implies that the brain (digital or wet) is a very important part of the equation, and just throwing sensors at the problem won't fix the fundamental need to have a highly sophisticated ML system running the show, and it's easier to get the training data you need for such a system if you're not using LIDAR.

> it's easier to get the training data you need for such a system if you're not using LIDAR.

“Less data is better for self-driving cars” is not the take I expected to hear from the Tesla mob today.

???

Tesla is clearly gathering more data for their self-driving program than Waymo, due almost entirely to the fact that the Tesla sensing package does not require installing LIDAR on every car.

you are clearly out of your depth. Waymo gathers way more data than Tesla, mainly because they can. Each Waymo car is free to transfer Terra bytes of data through their hard drive after each shift. Your average tesla car can only upload a couple hundred MB, if even that.

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