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Can cameras do it eventually is a bit of a tangent.

All the information is there in a video feed, but the amount of work to get reliable perception from it is not small. With LIDAR and radar you get to the end goal with less uncertainty.

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The real key is that things like LIDAR are designed to work well with the types of tasks computers are good at, like taking a bunch of precise measurements every second and performing complex calculations, while a binocular vision based understanding of the world is something humans are good at because we evolved that ability over millions of years.

You can probably eventually ("never" is a long time after all) get a computer to understand the world as well as a human purely through camera based sensors, but it's a much more difficult task than taking an approach that uses tools computers are already good at. Similarly, I suspect it would be an uphill battle to have a human drive using raw LIDAR input.

I think you underestimate how many guesses, approximations, and filling in your brain does to what you think you're seeing.

Absolutely. The goal of self-driving is to be better than human drivers. Even the best drivers struggle with the sun shining from low angles, or road reflections, or snow, and so on.

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