[EngineerBetter]

The big missing piece is not LIDAR, but causal reasoning. Autopilot and similar 'AI' cannot reason; it doesn't have a mental model to ponder 'what if' and can't use counter-factuals to ponder what would happen if it didn't do something. It's just glorified pattern matching currently.

Reading Judea Pearl's The Book Of Why certainly sobered my outlook on AI.

[andreyk]

Well, that's not necessarily true... self driving in particular usually uses planning, which is basically all about 'what if'. But it's true this is relevant to AI in general.

[Skunkleton]

Isn't that more of an indictment of the self-driving industry as a whole? In Tesla's case they are missing that, but they are also missing LIDAR (or some other thing to fill in that technological gap).