Is it really an "if"? I think it would be pretty safe bet that in 100 years human-quality CV object detection will be solved (note, we both know that it is possible AND this doesn't require AGI). So then it's really a question of when (presumably you don't need the full 100 years).
As an amateur (non-AI-expert) it seems to me that behind every corner is lurking a sub-problem that is AGI-equivalent. I don't see any reason to believe that humans do human-quality object detection without also deploying tremendous contextual understanding of the world. So perhaps it will turn out that a computer needs something similar?
I think decision making in driving is highly contextual, but LiDAR doesn’t help there either. Purely visual field extraction is something even very simple animals can do (presumably which much weaker abstract context processing capabilities).
Your dog can reliably detect objects, judge distance and avoid them.
That's all the person is saying. Simple animals can use only vision to do what we're using lidar and radar to do. But neither camera, lidar nor radar or any combination of them guarantees that you'll be able to make a computer drive a car in all situations.
For me, intuitively, the problem of reconstructing a distance field from cameras must be way harder than say, trying to predict what a person on a bike will do next, or detect road lines on the road in heavy rain or snow. So it seems very likely that an "AI" capable of driving a car in all situations would be powerful to not need lidar or radar (though I don't see the point of dropping radar, as it gives you some ability to "see" around objects which can make cars better than humans)
