What he's saying is that a human will, in those conditions, build up a speed in advance that is exactly enough to get up there before the speed has dropped too

What he's saying is that a human will, in those conditions, build up a speed in advance that is exactly enough to get up there before the speed has dropped too much (due to having to back off on the speed to keep traction. The computer can do the latter, but can it do the former? Probably when we get AI. But we don't have AI. Just machine learning.)