Musk's central point is that if humans can drive with two cameras, so can a machine. And he's right. Why wouldn't we do just as well as the visual cortex?

Humans have superior intelect, even if specific performance is lower. We have experince. We learned to drive, in the particular area where you operate your car generally, with all its idiosyncorcies. Then consider eye contact, nonverbal communication, bias, and personal investment in outcome that computers are incapable of. Its not as simple as better sensors and reaction time.

But isn't the whole point of autonomous cars that humans are pretty shitty drivers? If I could augment my vision with a 360º setup of cameras and LIDAR you better believe I would!

I'd say people are actually pretty good drivers. I'm more interested in autonomous for the time savings than I am for the potential safety improvements.

Tens of thousands of people are killed every year[1] in just the United States, humans are awful at driving. If autonomous vehicles are able to make driving as safe as flying it will be like curing breast cancer in terms of lives saved.

[1] http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/Fatality-estimates-Jun...

There are hundreds of millions of people in the US. Most of them drive. Is a few tens of thousands fatalities that bad in an absolute sense?

Are you serious? Yes, a stadium full of people dying every year is "that bad" in an absolute sense.

By what metric? You're leaving out any sense of proportion.

our eyes are a lot better than cameras in a lot of ways. Eyes have better dynamic range, better sensitivity in low light, extremely high resolution in the center, and an extremely wide field of view. The nerve cells in our retina are also wired up to do a lot of processing in real time at extremely high resolution, eg. things like motion/zoom/edge detection.

And that‘s not even taking into account that we actually understand what we see and can reason about unexpected input and react accordingly.