> To play devil's advocate - somehow I drove myself to work today, and the hardware I'm running is just two moderate resolution limited field of view cameras.
This sounds like a fallacy (not sure which one). Just because you can do it does not mean a machine can. There are things that babies can do that machines can't (in 2018).
That misses the point. The idea is that a human being is machine running on couple hundred Watts, twenty of which are spent on compute and sensing. There's no reason why a man-made device couldn't replicate the feat.
There is, in fact a reason we can't replicate that today, and it's not for lack of trying. We don't have neither the full understanding of the human machine nor the technology to replicate it. As an example, muscles are well-understood, but we haven't been able to make artificial muscles with energy efficiency in the same ballpark. The human brain is much less understood.
I'm not saying it won't be possible at some future date after some hypothetical breakthroughs, but we are far from it presently.
That is exactly what serious security said - "in practice you need lidar and a fully mapped road". The word "presently", "today" or "with current computational limitations" are notably missing from that statement. It would at least add some ambiguity to a statement that is provably wrong.
This is pedantry. It's the same as them saying "You need a rocket to send a payload into space" and someone retorts "No: you can also use a space elevator". The presently is implicit, and space elevators don't (yet) exist.
The initial statement is saying that there is no physical way to achieve this feat today without lidar. While millions of agents (humans) are currently doing this today without lidar, or even eyes in the back of their head. I don't see anybody/anything with the blasé regularity of human drivers without lidar (machine or not) moving things into space except via space craft. So to boldy claim that lidar is NEEDED is absurd. Speaking of getting things to space, I remember people telling the same guy, Elon, that you NEEDED a new rocket to launch your payload into space every time. It is funny, you needed that until you didn't. All the while, humans we, with the blasé regularity of human drivers without lidar, not throwing away their cargo aircraft every time freighted between airport.
This sounds like a fallacy (not sure which one). Just because you can do it does not mean a machine can. There are things that babies can do that machines can't (in 2018).