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bko | 6 days ago

Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive. Lidar just seems like feature engineering, which has proven to be a dead end in most other AI applications (bitter lesson).

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

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thunky|6 days ago

> Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive.

Because we want self driving cars to be safer than human driven cars.

If humans had built in lidar we would use it when driving.

bko|6 days ago

Read the comment again. It's not that vision is "good enough", it's that feature engineering doesn't work

afavour|6 days ago

Self driving cars are not equipped with human brains so this doesn’t really make sense.

“We should achieve self driving cars via replicating the human brain” strikes me as an incredibly inefficient and difficult way to solve the problem.

sebastos|6 days ago

Then you deeply underestimate how difficult the problem is, and deeply misunderstand where all the effort has been spent in developing autonomous vehicles.

Analemma_|6 days ago

This knee-jerk reply is old and tired, and the counterarguments are well-trod at this point. Even if cameras-only can build a car that’s as good as humans, why should we settle for “as good as“ humans, who cause 40,000 fatalities a year in the US? If we can do better than humans with more advanced sensors, we are practically morally obligated to do that.

stevenhuang|4 days ago

I would bet a large portion of fatalities is from distracted/bad driving, not that human sight was insufficient.

Phrased a different way, I would expect lidar to help marginally, but it is safer driving in general that will bring down fatalities. This could be done with cameras.

xpe|6 days ago

Yes! The smart and nuanced panoply of replies to the GP are a wonderful counterbalance to people "just saying things that pop into their head" -- which is unfortunately how I view a lot of human speech nowadays :/

jeltz|6 days ago

Humans can drive with eyes only, but we are better drivers when we can also use other senses like hearing. If humans has lidar we would use it when driving.

Ajedi32|6 days ago

The bitter lesson I think is a great way of explaining the logic behind Tesla's strategy. People aren't getting it.

Whether or not it'll actually work remains to be seen, but it's a perfectly reasonable strategy. One counterargument would be that the bitter lesson can be applied to LIDAR too; you don't have to use that data for feature engineering just because it seems well suited for it.

elicash|6 days ago

Don't cars already use a ton of sensors that don't reproduce human senses and ways of doing things?