[rainsford]

The real key is that things like LIDAR are designed to work well with the types of tasks computers are good at, like taking a bunch of precise measurements every second and performing complex calculations, while a binocular vision based understanding of the world is something humans are good at because we evolved that ability over millions of years.

You can probably eventually ("never" is a long time after all) get a computer to understand the world as well as a human purely through camera based sensors, but it's a much more difficult task than taking an approach that uses tools computers are already good at. Similarly, I suspect it would be an uphill battle to have a human drive using raw LIDAR input.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I think you underestimate how many guesses, approximations, and filling in your brain does to what you think you're seeing.