Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco
Humans don&#x27;t actually have any direct depth sensing either.  I don&#x27;t think your ears count because most objects you need to detect while driving aren&#x27;t really emitting anything your ears can pick up...<p>So in theory if Tesla had cameras instead of eyes, and those cameras were positioned were the driver&#x27;s eyes would be positioned, and its computer systems were a human brain, and those cameras has the dynamic range, resolution, auto-focus abilities of the human eyes (or better), then the car could drive just like a human.  The problem isn&#x27;t really that humans have direct depth sensing and the car doesn&#x27;t, the problem is the vision system of the car is inferior in many ways to the human&#x27;s vision system, and the brain of the car is far inferior to the human brain.<p>Better sensing can (maybe) make up for that.  If a car can sense <i>all</i> objects on the scene that it may collide with accuracy and far enough in advance then avoiding accidents becomes collision avoidance rather than general intelligence.  In ambiguous situations just don&#x27;t crash into anything and don&#x27;t go too close to other moving objects.  The car might not obey traffic rules perfectly but it probably wouldn&#x27;t crash ;)   If the car occasionally goes through a red light, or doesn&#x27;t stop in a stop sign, but does so safely (for itself and the surrounding traffic) then it&#x27;s not a big deal.  If the car relies on recognizing a stop sign even if it&#x27;s behind a tree or partially obscured and failure to recognize the sign leads to a side collision with other traffic or running over pedestrians that&#x27;s a little bit of a bigger deal.