Even just taking the argument on its surface, electronic cameras are not a match for human vision: * our eyes have incredible dynamic range. We can perceive de

Even just taking the argument on its surface, electronic cameras are not a match for human vision: * our eyes have incredible dynamic range. We can perceive details in deep shadow and bright sunlight at the same time in the same scene. Cameras aren't good at that, and certainly not at a price point a company that forgoes lidar for pricing reasons would be happy with. * our eyes combine wide angle low resolution perception with high resolution capture of a single point of interest, and switching between points of interest is super fast. No-one's even trying to replicate this electronically; the approach with digital cameras is to go for high resolution across the board, but this is nowhere near as high as what human eyes can manage in the centre of vision, and also because it results in a ton of data, SLAM applications tend to go for lower resolutions and more frequent images instead to help manage transfer and processing latency; however, this makes correctly parsing the scene a much harder problem than it would be either for the human or an electronic vision system of comparable fidelity. * our eyes include a bunch of processing to help with feature detection and cross correlation (for depth perception) before the signal ever makes it to our brain, which helps us deal with the latency/bandwidth issues described above. This is certainly something we could attempt to replicate electronically, but, well, Tesla didn't want to pay for lidar either, so not seeing that happening tbh. * our depth perception doesn't merely rely on cross correlating stereo vision to produce a depth field like electronic applications do. It synthesizes this with information such as the angle between our eyeballs and the shape the lens must take to bring the object of interest into focus, both of which vary depending on how far away the object of interest is. (This is part of why VR helmets make many people feel ill: they supply stereo images in perfect focus a small distance away from the eyes, and so these sources of information all disagree with each other; therefore, motion sickness.) Without some equivalent source of information - some form of electronic rangefinder, like lidar perhaps - the AI, unlike the human, is forced to rely only on cross correlating stereo images, which is problematic in a variety of tedious ways.