[sokoloff]

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.

[micromacrofoot]

Humans haven’t evolved radar, but computer vision systems are also worse than human vision systems in many ways, so they need to compensate

[sokoloff]

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).

[micromacrofoot]

> 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

[sokoloff]

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.)

[mola]

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.