[xoa]

>In the long run, binocular cameras should be enough.

No they won't. They have all the issues that pure visible light sensors fundamentally have in Earth weather and lighting conditions. There hasn't been much choice for human drivers obviously (though in principle there we could have pushed for better HUD ages ago, and could still make use of AR), but with the switch to computers we can and should do better. It is foolish not to make use of better data input.

>We are an existence proof of that.

Proof of what? Millions of deaths and casualties every single year due to driving? We tolerate it because the benefits are even bigger, and there aren't any other options. It is literally worth mass suffering and death, not to mention economic expense, to gain arbitrary point-to-point mechanized transportation. But that acceptance is purely a relative matter because there is nothing better, as with medical technology standards can and will change once we can improve. There is no reason that self driving cars shouldn't generally be able to see animals (deer, moose etc) in a pitch black night in the fog for example and keep from running into them. Yeah that'd be impossible for us, but that's not a law of physics just a limitation of information input limited purely to the visual spectrum. Using humans as a standard is really foolish given how objectively terrible we are at this.

[ModernMech]

> Using humans as a standard is really foolish given how objectively terrible we are at this.

Yeah, it would be foolish to use my grandmother as a benchmark for driverless cars. Humanity would experience a net increase in safety if she were to take a driverless car to church.

But even the best driverless car today with all their LIDARs can't outperform my father, a 40 year veteran of UPS with literally millions of accident free miles under his belt in every driving condition imaginable - rain, sleet, snow, fog, bright sun. All with binocular cameras, and a finely tuned driving ethic. If I presented UPS with a fleet of similarly capable driverless trucks, I would be a billionaire, and the world would be net-safer.

[mrep]

US car fatalities are at 1.16 per 100 million miles in 2017 [0]. Anecdotal evidence for accidents based on multiple orders of magnitude less miles doesn't say much (fatalities was the first data i could find) [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[1]: 20 mph average driving rate (guess on my part but they stop a lot) * 8 hours a day * 5 days week * 50 weeks a year * 40 years = 1.6 million miles

[ModernMech]

Anecdotal evidence shows that's it's possible. It shows under the right condition with the right controller, it's possible to go millions of miles without making a single mistake for a human with binocular camera sensors.

Over all human drivers we don't get that result, of course. But how many were following too closely? How many were distracted? How many were sleepy? How many were intoxicated? How many were going too fast? How many were old? How many have a slow reaction time? How many weren't wearing their glasses? All of the above factors have nothing to do with the sensory input to the controller, but are indictments of the individual controllers themselves.

Some human controllers are better than others. Some people hit parked cars. Some people go millions of miles without hitting anything. They both have binocular input sensors. If we equip a car with binocular cameras, that doesn't mean we will have the same result as humans in aggregate. Computers will never get drunk. Computers will never be distracted. In the limit, where we have the right cognition, I believe we won't need LIDAR to achieve better aggregate results than the ones you quoted. It would be as if everyone drove like my father, rather than grandmother.

What do you think the fatality rate over all of UPS, Fedex, and USPS are? Some quick Googling shows that UPS alone logs over 3 billion miles per year for their fleet, with only 25 deaths per year. That's 0.8 deaths per 100 million miles. So we can see with proper training, a human controller can be 100% more effective at preventing death than the general population. And the question still remains -- why were those deaths caused? Were they due to being limited to binocular cameras? Or were they something we could program away like being distracted or driving drunk? Or maybe some were unavoidable under any circumstance? I don't know, but it definitely shows me that this idea that humans are de facto terrible at driving and therefore binocular sensors are not enough for driverless cars (again in the long run) is questionable.

[bobsil1]

- Lidar and visible light both use EM radiation, just different wavelengths, coherence and active v. passive

- Passive sensors have huge range, power and deconfliction advantages

- The better system is passive sensors in superhuman wavelengths

- Even Levandowski's come around to Elon's POV on unnecessary lidar