I disagree. Our brains have massive plasticity, even into adulthood, and can quite literally rewire themselves for how they're being used.
The first time you really get on the throttle on a sportbike, the effect is almost universally a "Woooooaoaaaaaaah!" sort of thing - the universe around you "goes plaid," and it feels like the hand of God has grabbed the horizon and yanked it to you. Hard. And then you get used to it, and people who ride powerful motorcycles or race them are perfectly capable of doing so for long periods of time, at high concentration. Go watch some clips of a motorcycle race, if you haven't. That's not born, that's learned.
Same goes for driving cars, for flying planes at Mach 2, for... really everything humans do. I wasn't born knowing how to use a keyboard, but I've been using one so long that I don't even think about it anymore.
The human brain is insanely adaptable, which is how it works well in all these cases.
And I'll also disagree that our eyes suck. The human visual processing system is damned good at handling a 3D world. It's got a few quirks, but overall? It's properly impressive.
Yes our eyes have very good dynamic range, but we’ll never have LIDAR and low light.
Driving data is cultural data, its not some natural phenomenon. Its highly regulated and its more orderly than nature. Drive in the developing world to know how true that is.
Plus driving behavior will adapt with the increase in autonomous cars. I wouldn’t be surprised if people purposely started shunting cars in self drive mode off the road, out of fun or spite.
There is no way full autonomy happens, unless you throw singularity level processing at it.
Agree, except you are missing / under selling something.
It’s the car sensors that are great, and the human with the crappy cameras.
Our eyes suck. Our attention spans suck. Our reaction times suck. To paraphrase my one of my favorite xkcds, “There is nothing in our evolution that could have prepared us for driving heavy boxes at high speeds”.
However… somehow, we excel at it. We drive in all conditions despite the crappy inputs and processing. The IDEA that we could be able to make computers do it is sound.
The execution is not! And I don’t think it will be for a long time.
We had self driving vehicles 100 years ago, your horse would take you home despite how drunk you were. No one wants their car to get spooked of a shadow or floating bag though.
The REAL solution to this is that cars need to be trains with figurative tracks. There needs to be an infrastructure in place that reports to the vehicle. V2I (Vehicle to Infrastructure) and V2V.
Without that, this is all pointless and I’m surprised how much tome and power is being wasted on it.
If the big brains behind this were truly serious, it would be in place now for semis that do the same A-B-A route over and over and can slow down to speed that would annoy a consumer car owner if it isn’t sure.
There is just not going to be enough sensors and machine learning to handle no road paint, other drivers, new trolley problem, blinding whiteout, etc. Never will be.