[rsynnott]

> Elon Musk's bet is that self-driving cars can just use just cameras, basic radar and ultrasonic sensors with enough compute resources and the right ML algorithms to perform better than a human.

I'm not sure that unsubstantiated claims from Elon Musk are actual evidence that lidar isn't necessary.

[shadowgovt]

It's substantiated by the fact that humans don't have radar and ultrasonics, just two cameras on a swivel and a lot of signal processing, and they succeed at operating a car to five-nines reliability measured in miles traversed. So Musk's bet isn't completely bonkers; he knows of at least one reference system that does the task with fewer sensors than even shipped with the Tesla.

... but we do want the SDC to do better, and there are failure modes that human perception is also vulnerable to generally. In addition to closing the gap faster on solving the problem without a copy of the human perception wetware, the LIDAR signal might also improve on those perception error states and be worth keeping in the design even if it could be done with cameras alone (or camera + radar + ultrasonic).

[rsynnott]

I mean, sure, humans don't have radar or ultrasonics.

However, computers don't have human brains, and AI doesn't provide _anything like them_.

[shadowgovt]

Defininitely agree, and I think that's the devil hiding in the details about Musk's bet that is worth surfacing: he's making the bet "We can just build a computer as good at this complex highly-variable task as a human being," and it's a bet people have been making and losing for decades.

Some day, someone will make that bet and be right. I haven't put my money on this team and this project. ;)