Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. The question is whether you can put enough compute and data together into a car to be able to do it live.
Why even bother when we can make artificial eyes that see depth? The price of LIDAR has plummeted and will continue to plummet. We already know that it works really, really well for self-driving with today's available compute+data.
It's not a given that a camera will even work as well as a human if it's attached to a human brain. The human eye is stereo, it has a focusable lens, an iris, it's incredibly sensitive and the foveated retina has a very high resolution. Can't say the same for the cheap-ass cameras on the Tesla. I'm not sure there is a camera on Earth that is the equal to the eye (yet).
I can't see in the dark, can't see in the fog or the rain, can't see UV, my eyes only see in the rough direction my head is facing, there's a limited ability to track objects. Bicycles coming from behind are particularly easy to miss. Speaking of easy to miss, there's a hole in your vision m that you doing notice, where the optic nerve is. Hell, there's a whole body of work for times when human vision falls short and gets fooled, called optical illusions. There's another whole field of study about failures of the lenses and other parts in the eyes themselves. Some of those failures an electronic camera system is also going to have/have a reliance on components not being broken.
Given the number of shortcomings of human vision why shouldn't our self driving cars be designed to have better than human vision, especially if the goal is to not get into crashes. Humans, with human vision and human object tracking skills, and human reaction times get into crashes all the time. Shouldn't we want better and more sensors, which would lead to few fewer crashes, simply because better sensors have better data available?
Fair point! Is there some advantage eyes have that wouldn't be surmountable with simply more cameras (i.e. to capture different exposure ranges etc)? I actually haven't thought about this side of it super closely, but I think you're right.
Resolution; extreme dynamic range in a single exposure; sensitivity with short exposures in low light; focal range and speed of refocusing; white point adjustments (happening to a large degree in the retina as receptors become temporarily desensitized to a given wavelength with uninterrupted exposure). I’m sure there are more.
It's a question of cost and technology. Cinema cameras don't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just because studios like spending money. Humans can see differences between even the best cameras on the market.
It's also a bit of a false analogy. Cameras don't really work like human vision. We do things like mesopic vision that simply aren't possible with current sensors. We have massively high resolution. We have async "pixels" that can respond immediately without waiting for a framing signal. Our brains process color in truly weird ways.
It's not like there's some physical law preventing computer vision from being better than human vision, but it's an incredibly difficult engineering problem that we've spent the better part of a century attacking without clearly winning.
Why even bother when we can make artificial eyes that see depth? The price of LIDAR has plummeted and will continue to plummet. We already know that it works really, really well for self-driving with today's available compute+data.