The point of the article, to me, is computer vision will never be enough. These are machines and need to be augmented with radar and other object detection methods.
Radar etc. almost certainly make it easier, but for it to be "never" this would also have to be provably impossible for humans.
Which isn't too say it's not never, as I remember studies in my own childhood that said human drivers were also bad at recognising how far away children were, and I've never heard of human perception of skin colour being tested in this way so it might just turn out that melanin is unfortunately good camouflage against tarmac…
…but unless and until that suggestion turns out to be correct of all humans, I default to assuming we're an existence proof of the capability to do without, and that means I still wouldn't say "never" to sufficiently advanced AI doing at least as well.
I'm confident that a comprehensive study would show that on average humans are worse at detecting people of color against dark backgrounds (if we agree this is code for "people with highly pigmented skin" and not Asians or Latinos). There is just much less contrast to work with, and dark skin also makes facial features stand out less (which is an issue because faces are the thing humans can recognize best).
There is a discussion we could have whether we want to measure self-driving cars against an ideal perfect baseline or against the status quo. But of course the ideal case is much easier to define, and has fewer things that make some people uncomfortable.
I’m harder to see on a rainy winter night if I wear a black jacket vs a bright orange one. I learned early in it wear bright orange on those nights given that I was almost clipped by human driven cars a few time. Clothing choices are important.
It’s intended to replace human drivers who have not yet evolved radar. I agree that radar could make it easier and/or more reliable, but there’s a pretty strong argument that building a system to equal/exceed humans using vision alone is possible.
They are currently worse in many ways. So, perhaps the computer vision systems need to continue to improve until such time as they deliver clearly superior results to the as-observed outcomes of human drivers.
I worked on the vision system for an autonomous vehicle program in 1991, using the processing power available then. Our team held several world records at the time for different categories of completely autonomous travel on public highways.
If you fit any kind of curve between what (relatively little) we could do then for ~$200K in equipment and what a production car with < $1K of BOM costs can do today, it's reasonable to predict that well within my lifetime that vision-only autonomous driving systems could be better than a human on typical roads (absent snow cover).
> better than a human on typical roads (absent snow cover).
the weather caveats feel like evergreen statements about self-driving and make me feel like it's further off than most people realize — I agree that the improvements have been impressive over our lifetimes, but like in most general tasks there's still an enormous gulf between biology and technology
we'll get there eventually, and much faster than biology did (ie, not millions of years)... but I wouldn't be surprised if full self-driving was another 20 years out
I've made the same "never, ever will we completely replace human drivers" predictions before, informed by my experience trying to do it 30+ years ago but also by dozens of winters' worth of driving on snow-covered roads in New England.
But there are huge potential gains even if self-driving is only usable in 99.8% of driving scenarios, provided there's adequate safeguards and sensible hand-overs to human drivers. (Not dumping an out-of-control, at-speed automobile into the human driver's lap with 50 milliseconds of notice.)
The human eye is a better "camera" than anything we use today in self driving cars (just read about the eyes dynamic range).
Not to mention that human hearing has unbelievable audiolocalization ability that we struggle to explain.
Which isn't too say it's not never, as I remember studies in my own childhood that said human drivers were also bad at recognising how far away children were, and I've never heard of human perception of skin colour being tested in this way so it might just turn out that melanin is unfortunately good camouflage against tarmac…
…but unless and until that suggestion turns out to be correct of all humans, I default to assuming we're an existence proof of the capability to do without, and that means I still wouldn't say "never" to sufficiently advanced AI doing at least as well.