The magic key for me is to tell no one about my project, until it’s in a workable state. Just telling someone what I want to do, including the details of my plans, is sometimes enough for me to never actually start with it. But keeping it quiet—which is very hard mind you—leads to me actually acting on my plans.

That statement of him is not entirely wrong. But we humans have a very powerful bio computer that is perfectly tuned to process those visual inputs in realtime. Until a comparable performance is possible, removing LIDAR is very stupid.