How often a do you encounter situations like bad fog/sun set/rain at night where it’s a total struggle to drive and you slow right down to a crawl and even then only do alright because of a ton of inference?
i think Tesla deciding to go vision only will be regarded of one of the greatest blunders is self driving history.
Current AI isn't that, but in principle it could get there.
Pattern matching for driving is probably better, frankly. You don't have people who are stressed out, pissed off, inattentive or in a hurry doing risky stuff on the road.
The accidents caused by people with a lapse in judgement are much more memorable than the billions driving safely and preventively every day.
100+ car pileups in Southern California checking in to provide a counterexample.
The patchy fog in Southern California on I-5 can go from "not too bad" to "can't see your own hood" in a matter of seconds. Radar is going to catch hazards WAY before a human will.
This leaves the question of moving to radar, but for precise resolution well ahead of the vehicle you need microwaves and a lot of power, I would guess - which reduces the vehicle's range. For all I know you might parboil passersby, too. One old Mig had a radar that would kill and roast rabbits on the runway as it took off, but that's a much different use case, of course.
No AI (reasoning) exists yet, only Machine Learning. It will take decades if not centuries.
What do you mean by "reasoning", such that there is no example of a ML system that does this?
From actual AI wiki article: “highly mathematical-statistical machine learning has dominated the field”. This will never be able to drive as good as humans.
Even if they could, a goal of self driving should be to do better than a human driver. Avoiding technology that can "see" in ways a human cannot is just short-sighted, and a huge missed opportunity.
And all that still even ignores the fact that many common environmental conditions make driving only with human eyes very unsafe. Think fog or heavy rain. A car relying only in cameras to drive in those situations will be next to useless.
Agree with your other points.
Imagine a foggy condition that causes a 50 car pile up on the highway. Which is more likely to avoid the collision, a Tesla that slowed down because it couldn't see or a Waymo/Cruise blasting down the highway at 65 mph because it's Lidar can see through the fog?
Blackmore, and Aeva can see through fog and dust that others can’t. Most sensors can see sufficiently through rain and snow.