11 ms·

Google self-driving car pioneer wants to teach people how to face the future

70 points by w1ntermute 11y ago

bsaunder 11y ago
I agree with the premise that machines will increasing exceed our capabilities (and are improving quicker than we are). This seems so obvious as to be not debatable. I also think there are a lot of merits to online-education and Udacity seems to have the right general idea. On-line education needs to be more engaging and entertaining than simply videos and online collaboration. However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. In our current economic model, this seems like increased pain for most of us. IMHO it would be much better if we could stop this denial. We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. I think a much better strategy would be for us to start focusing our best and brightest on full automation of our needs and basic wants so that we can provide most essential services to people with minimal human and resource cost.
- Mimu 11y ago
  I agree with that. Not sure if the basic income is THE solution, I didn't think about it too much, but I agree with everything else. People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    I'm honestly curious how many people on HN oppose mincome on grounds other than "we currently can't pay that much."
  - filoeleven 11y ago
    > People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs. People don't need money, they need a level of security in the basic necessities: food, water, shelter. Money is the primary legal way to get these things, but the basic necessities are the issue, not money. Basic income, or any good solution involving money, is pragmatic and worthy of consideration since money is so embedded in the culture, but when we are talking about real needs we're talking about physical needs, of which money is not one.
- mathattack 11y ago
  Many great scientists (Einstein amongst them) get into trouble when they veer into Economics. Einstein predicted social unrest from massive unemployment due to productivity improvements. Productivity improvements help people in aggregate. The question here is will a small subset of the world accrue all the benefit from the AI productivity improvement? One answer is basic income, presumably based on taxation of the rich. Is another answer some kind of universal ownership scheme of the companies creating the AI? I'm not advocating government ownership of business (this rarely ends well) but perhaps some way for the government to give shares in index funds in lieu of basic cash payments? Essentially equity based social security or welfare payments in lieu of some portion of the cash payments. I haven't thought this fully through yet, but it does allow some aspect of shared upside. (My sense is there will be a lot of shared upside anyway, similar to how we all benefit from free maps and search)
  - hiddencost 11y ago
    Russia tried that. When the USSR ended, they gave every one vouchers to bid for shares of state owned companies. The little people had no idea what they were doing and got screwed brutally. It created many of the ridiculously wealthy Russian oligarchs you see today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia
    - nhaehnle 11y ago
      Interesting. The fundamental goal seemed a noble one, but it was badly implemented. Any lessons to take away? One immediate idea is some kind of vesting, i.e. you can't actually sell your vouchers for X years (or stages, being able to sell certain percentages after a certain number of years). A second idea is to encourage the formation of public interest associations to manage the ownership. There are already some non-traditional funds run with some social goals in addition to the goal of making money, perhaps that would help. (But I'm really just brainstorming right now.)
      - ambicapter 11y ago
- criddell 11y ago
  > We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. So putting a floor on what people get each year seems like a pretty good idea. How about a ceiling as well? What's an equitable spread? 10x? 100x? Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?
  - iamcurious 11y ago
    >Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get? One of the main arguments of basic income, as opposed to unemployment benefits, is to reduce the bureaucracy involved. So the answer would be an empathetic 'no'. Hopefully, having a guaranteed income decoupled from location would push people to populate cheaper places. And thus, rent would get much cheaper overall.
    - criddell 11y ago
      > reduce the bureaucracy involved Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea.
      - unabridged 11y ago
        Checking that people actually live where they claim requires a big bureaucracy. For 2.5x the money a lot of people would claim to be homeless living in Manhattan.
      - iamcurious 11y ago
        >Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. See what unabridged said. >Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea. Giving people more money because the rent is more expensive where they live equates to giving more money to landlords. That is an even more terrible idea. Besides, Manhattan isn't that good of a place to live. Specially when you aren't tied to the job market and can take more risks.
  - 11y ago
- bduerst 11y ago
  UBI isn't the answer - there are goods and services with income-elastic prices that will be just as out of reach with UBI as it was before. A prime example of this is housing, which is why many government welfare programs stipulate what the delivered value can be spent on (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) as opposed to just open-ended income. Is it perfect? No. With every massive government program comes bureaucratic overhead - but throwing it out for something without the overhead but potentially economically damaging side effects isn't the solution.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In the long-term, sure: if we can successfully build an AI smarter than humans, it's unlikely any job will survive. But at the same time, no job will need to; there's a balance there. Planning for a post-scarcity economy makes sense, but the plans that work in such an economy don't necessarily work when scarcity still exists.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    > But at the same time, no job will need to Why? Because this AI, which is basically just people smarter than us and getting smarter by the day, will decide that its only purpose in life is to serve its idiot masters?
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Because if we build it correctly, it won't be a person at all, and won't have a value function orthogonal to our own. Building something that can self-improve and solve problems doesn't mean we need to build something that has independent will, motivation, or values. And it's a lot safer not to.
      - StavrosK 11y ago
        Sure, but "an AI that's smarter than humans" implies that. I'm sure we'll build many algorithms that are better than us at specific tasks, and we already have.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Even building algorithms that are better than us at any general-purpose task still doesn't require giving those algorithms agency or independent values of their own.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  > In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. What happens is that pressure is simply increasing all the time, and people are on a bell curve w.r.t. how well they can keep up. We are effectively grabbing that bell curve and pulling its ends much further apart. We need a solution, otherwise things are going to get very, very ugly.
ihsw 11y ago
> To the extent we are seeing the beginning of a battle between artificial intelligence (AI) and humanity, I am 100% loyal to people. Perhaps I'm just jaded or cynical, but fuck people. We, as a species, are the greatest threat to ourselves, and we are our greatest asset. An individual may be brilliant, and and large groups congregating together into governments that empower hundreds of millions of individuals may be the greatest feat our species has accomplished, but there is just so much instability across a wide spectrum of life. We, as a species, are approaching the limit of what 7B people on this planet are capable of. Globalization is piquing and revolutionary growth will pique with it, and maintaining the rate at which we grow will be accomplished by broad-sweeping reforms with the end-goal being tearing down inefficiencies -- starting with economic. We, as a species, absolutely can bring a first-world quality of life to everybody, so why shouldn't we? We, as a species, absolutely can cooperate and govern on a global scale, where such cooperation is codified into law, so why shouldn't we? The answer is that we don't want to because we can't handle giving up control to those other people because they don't have our best interests in mind. How do we face the future? By letting go of our ill-conceived notion that we are fit to govern ourselves in the current manner, and accept that operational control of various aspects of humanity (eg: supply chain management, namely natural resource allocation and food distribution) will be automated, and as such outside of the purview of human judgement.
- kaybe 11y ago
  > We, as a species, absolutely can bring a first-world quality of life to everybody, so why shouldn't we? Not with the current lifestyle and the given ressources.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    Not with the current technology and the given resources. Most of the biomass on the planet lives happily in its means. We need to think like that. That means building with carbon, not metal.
    - adrianN 11y ago
      Most of the biomass on the planet is in a constant struggle to increase its means and usurp its competition. Humans are just really good at that game.
astazangasta 11y ago
This is not about humans vs machines, it is STILL, after all these centuries, about labor vs capital.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Pretty much. The massive automation that happened during early 20th century modernization sparked a unionizing movement with laborers. Kind of interesting that we don't see that level of organization now.
ericjang 11y ago
Even though the standard of living is raised for all humans, it seems like advances in AI and automation will drastically reduce the percentage of productive members of society, in spite of educational opportunity. Improving educational opportunities (a la Udacity) is a noble idea because it levels the playing field a bit (giving the underprivileged a chance), but the end result is the same - a small number of people will inevitably own AI, and the world by extension. Assuming that the new AI titans are compelled to share their wealth with humanity, wouldn't less productive members of society still face existential threat? Improved standard of living only takes care of the first 2-3 layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs - but "esteem" and "self-actualization" are really important as well.
- seiji 11y ago
  but "esteem" and "self-actualization" are really important as well. Many people fill those needs with banal things like drinking contests or sports.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    You mean, as opposed to banal things like their jobs?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 11y ago
Arrogant, as is typical of those with a financial stake in a particular version of progress. This guy is under the belief that his version of the future will happen and that it is his job to help others realise that truth. Technological progress may be inevitable, but that progress envisioned by any particular person is not. Nanodegrees may seem a good idea, and they no doubt make sense financially to google, but that does not make them inevitable. People have been attending today's traditional schools since long before the Aztecs were even a thing (Cambridge 1200s). There is wisdom in those years. It may be time to change that wisdom, but it won't happen within a generation. Self-driving cars seem likely but are not inevitable. All sorts of safety-enhancing technologies are dropped for apparently irrelevant reasons. Why do we sell cars that can break speed limits? Why do school buses not have seat belts? Why do planes still have error-prone pilots? Why are alcohol and cigarettes still a thing? Each of those have at some point been challenged by technological progressives who though their version of the future was unavoidable. Each was proven wrong. Only the arrogant assume the future. fyi, anyone who thinks driverless cars are inevitable should look at the futurama exhibit of 1939. We were then going to have them by 1960. Then it was ford. Now it is google. I'll believe it when I see it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_%28New_York_World%27s_Fair%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_%28New_York_World%27s...
- moe 11y ago
  Self-driving cars seem likely but are not inevitable. Yes they are inevitable. All sorts of safety-enhancing technologies are dropped Self-driving cars are not only a "safety-enhancing technology". First and foremost they are a money-saving technology. Over 4 million people are employed in the USA transportation industry[1]. 1.7 million of them are truck drivers[2]. Global logistics companies will save billions of dollars per year by upgrading their fleets to self-driving vehicles. [1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm [2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/heavy-and-tractor-trailer-truck-drivers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/he...
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    My point: There are often seemingly irrational reasons why new technologies are not adopted. One can make all rational arguments only to have them fall down when it comes to implementation. It is arrogant to assume that one today can perfectly predict technology tomorrow. (I say perfectly because the OP references only a narrow range of self-drive tech, not acknowledging all the other options.)
stonogo 11y ago
When this company can build a phone that won't crash, I'll believe they can build a car that won't crash. Until that day comes I feel like stern warnings of the coming economic revolution are not really in order.
arstin 11y ago
If Thrun is right about AI "outsmarting people in every dimension", how in the world could more entertaining job training videos organized into "nanodegrees" help us at all? I know this article was just a free ad for Udacity so he had to say self-serving things, but do you think the dude really believes this??? As others have pointed out, the real problem before us this century is to somehow decouple having a basic standard of living from performing work---more specifically from "contributing to productivity". My amateur guess is that even with our current state of food and energy production, the biggest barrier isn't the massively difficult economic and organizational problem, but advancing as a culture beyond our entrenched moral assumption that the means for basic living is something to be earned rather than a human right.

70 points by w1ntermute 11y ago

I agree with the premise that machines will increasing exceed our capabilities (and are improving quicker than we are). This seems so obvious as to be not debatable. I also think there are a lot of merits to online-education and Udacity seems to have the right general idea. On-line education needs to be more engaging and entertaining than simply videos and online collaboration. However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. In our current economic model, this seems like increased pain for most of us. IMHO it would be much better if we could stop this denial. We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. I think a much better strategy would be for us to start focusing our best and brightest on full automation of our needs and basic wants so that we can provide most essential services to people with minimal human and resource cost.

Mimu 11y ago
I agree with that. Not sure if the basic income is THE solution, I didn't think about it too much, but I agree with everything else. People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs.
- afarrell 11y ago
  I'm honestly curious how many people on HN oppose mincome on grounds other than "we currently can't pay that much."
- filoeleven 11y ago
  > People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs. People don't need money, they need a level of security in the basic necessities: food, water, shelter. Money is the primary legal way to get these things, but the basic necessities are the issue, not money. Basic income, or any good solution involving money, is pragmatic and worthy of consideration since money is so embedded in the culture, but when we are talking about real needs we're talking about physical needs, of which money is not one.
mathattack 11y ago
Many great scientists (Einstein amongst them) get into trouble when they veer into Economics. Einstein predicted social unrest from massive unemployment due to productivity improvements. Productivity improvements help people in aggregate. The question here is will a small subset of the world accrue all the benefit from the AI productivity improvement? One answer is basic income, presumably based on taxation of the rich. Is another answer some kind of universal ownership scheme of the companies creating the AI? I'm not advocating government ownership of business (this rarely ends well) but perhaps some way for the government to give shares in index funds in lieu of basic cash payments? Essentially equity based social security or welfare payments in lieu of some portion of the cash payments. I haven't thought this fully through yet, but it does allow some aspect of shared upside. (My sense is there will be a lot of shared upside anyway, similar to how we all benefit from free maps and search)
- hiddencost 11y ago
  Russia tried that. When the USSR ended, they gave every one vouchers to bid for shares of state owned companies. The little people had no idea what they were doing and got screwed brutally. It created many of the ridiculously wealthy Russian oligarchs you see today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia
  - nhaehnle 11y ago
    Interesting. The fundamental goal seemed a noble one, but it was badly implemented. Any lessons to take away? One immediate idea is some kind of vesting, i.e. you can't actually sell your vouchers for X years (or stages, being able to sell certain percentages after a certain number of years). A second idea is to encourage the formation of public interest associations to manage the ownership. There are already some non-traditional funds run with some social goals in addition to the goal of making money, perhaps that would help. (But I'm really just brainstorming right now.)
    - ambicapter 11y ago
criddell 11y ago
> We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. So putting a floor on what people get each year seems like a pretty good idea. How about a ceiling as well? What's an equitable spread? 10x? 100x? Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?
- iamcurious 11y ago
  >Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get? One of the main arguments of basic income, as opposed to unemployment benefits, is to reduce the bureaucracy involved. So the answer would be an empathetic 'no'. Hopefully, having a guaranteed income decoupled from location would push people to populate cheaper places. And thus, rent would get much cheaper overall.
  - criddell 11y ago
    > reduce the bureaucracy involved Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea.
    - unabridged 11y ago
      Checking that people actually live where they claim requires a big bureaucracy. For 2.5x the money a lot of people would claim to be homeless living in Manhattan.
    - iamcurious 11y ago
      >Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. See what unabridged said. >Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea. Giving people more money because the rent is more expensive where they live equates to giving more money to landlords. That is an even more terrible idea. Besides, Manhattan isn't that good of a place to live. Specially when you aren't tied to the job market and can take more risks.
- 11y ago
bduerst 11y ago
UBI isn't the answer - there are goods and services with income-elastic prices that will be just as out of reach with UBI as it was before. A prime example of this is housing, which is why many government welfare programs stipulate what the delivered value can be spent on (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) as opposed to just open-ended income. Is it perfect? No. With every massive government program comes bureaucratic overhead - but throwing it out for something without the overhead but potentially economically damaging side effects isn't the solution.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
> However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In the long-term, sure: if we can successfully build an AI smarter than humans, it's unlikely any job will survive. But at the same time, no job will need to; there's a balance there. Planning for a post-scarcity economy makes sense, but the plans that work in such an economy don't necessarily work when scarcity still exists.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  > But at the same time, no job will need to Why? Because this AI, which is basically just people smarter than us and getting smarter by the day, will decide that its only purpose in life is to serve its idiot masters?
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Because if we build it correctly, it won't be a person at all, and won't have a value function orthogonal to our own. Building something that can self-improve and solve problems doesn't mean we need to build something that has independent will, motivation, or values. And it's a lot safer not to.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Sure, but "an AI that's smarter than humans" implies that. I'm sure we'll build many algorithms that are better than us at specific tasks, and we already have.
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Even building algorithms that are better than us at any general-purpose task still doesn't require giving those algorithms agency or independent values of their own.
Florin_Andrei 11y ago
> In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. What happens is that pressure is simply increasing all the time, and people are on a bell curve w.r.t. how well they can keep up. We are effectively grabbing that bell curve and pulling its ends much further apart. We need a solution, otherwise things are going to get very, very ugly.

ihsw 11y ago

> To the extent we are seeing the beginning of a battle between artificial intelligence (AI) and humanity, I am 100% loyal to people. Perhaps I'm just jaded or cynical, but fuck people. We, as a species, are the greatest threat to ourselves, and we are our greatest asset. An individual may be brilliant, and and large groups congregating together into governments that empower hundreds of millions of individuals may be the greatest feat our species has accomplished, but there is just so much instability across a wide spectrum of life. We, as a species, are approaching the limit of what 7B people on this planet are capable of. Globalization is piquing and revolutionary growth will pique with it, and maintaining the rate at which we grow will be accomplished by broad-sweeping reforms with the end-goal being tearing down inefficiencies -- starting with economic. We, as a species, absolutely can bring a first-world quality of life to everybody, so why shouldn't we? We, as a species, absolutely can cooperate and govern on a global scale, where such cooperation is codified into law, so why shouldn't we? The answer is that we don't want to because we can't handle giving up control to those other people because they don't have our best interests in mind. How do we face the future? By letting go of our ill-conceived notion that we are fit to govern ourselves in the current manner, and accept that operational control of various aspects of humanity (eg: supply chain management, namely natural resource allocation and food distribution) will be automated, and as such outside of the purview of human judgement.

kaybe 11y ago
> We, as a species, absolutely can bring a first-world quality of life to everybody, so why shouldn't we? Not with the current lifestyle and the given ressources.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  Not with the current technology and the given resources. Most of the biomass on the planet lives happily in its means. We need to think like that. That means building with carbon, not metal.
  - adrianN 11y ago
    Most of the biomass on the planet is in a constant struggle to increase its means and usurp its competition. Humans are just really good at that game.

astazangasta 11y ago

This is not about humans vs machines, it is STILL, after all these centuries, about labor vs capital.

bduerst 11y ago
Pretty much. The massive automation that happened during early 20th century modernization sparked a unionizing movement with laborers. Kind of interesting that we don't see that level of organization now.

ericjang 11y ago

Even though the standard of living is raised for all humans, it seems like advances in AI and automation will drastically reduce the percentage of productive members of society, in spite of educational opportunity. Improving educational opportunities (a la Udacity) is a noble idea because it levels the playing field a bit (giving the underprivileged a chance), but the end result is the same - a small number of people will inevitably own AI, and the world by extension. Assuming that the new AI titans are compelled to share their wealth with humanity, wouldn't less productive members of society still face existential threat? Improved standard of living only takes care of the first 2-3 layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs - but "esteem" and "self-actualization" are really important as well.

seiji 11y ago
but "esteem" and "self-actualization" are really important as well. Many people fill those needs with banal things like drinking contests or sports.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  You mean, as opposed to banal things like their jobs?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sandworm101 11y ago

Arrogant, as is typical of those with a financial stake in a particular version of progress. This guy is under the belief that his version of the future will happen and that it is his job to help others realise that truth. Technological progress may be inevitable, but that progress envisioned by any particular person is not. Nanodegrees may seem a good idea, and they no doubt make sense financially to google, but that does not make them inevitable. People have been attending today's traditional schools since long before the Aztecs were even a thing (Cambridge 1200s). There is wisdom in those years. It may be time to change that wisdom, but it won't happen within a generation. Self-driving cars seem likely but are not inevitable. All sorts of safety-enhancing technologies are dropped for apparently irrelevant reasons. Why do we sell cars that can break speed limits? Why do school buses not have seat belts? Why do planes still have error-prone pilots? Why are alcohol and cigarettes still a thing? Each of those have at some point been challenged by technological progressives who though their version of the future was unavoidable. Each was proven wrong. Only the arrogant assume the future. fyi, anyone who thinks driverless cars are inevitable should look at the futurama exhibit of 1939. We were then going to have them by 1960. Then it was ford. Now it is google. I'll believe it when I see it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_%28New_York_World%27s_Fair%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_%28New_York_World%27s...

moe 11y ago
Self-driving cars seem likely but are not inevitable. Yes they are inevitable. All sorts of safety-enhancing technologies are dropped Self-driving cars are not only a "safety-enhancing technology". First and foremost they are a money-saving technology. Over 4 million people are employed in the USA transportation industry[1]. 1.7 million of them are truck drivers[2]. Global logistics companies will save billions of dollars per year by upgrading their fleets to self-driving vehicles. [1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm [2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/heavy-and-tractor-trailer-truck-drivers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/he...
- sandworm101 11y ago
  My point: There are often seemingly irrational reasons why new technologies are not adopted. One can make all rational arguments only to have them fall down when it comes to implementation. It is arrogant to assume that one today can perfectly predict technology tomorrow. (I say perfectly because the OP references only a narrow range of self-drive tech, not acknowledging all the other options.)

stonogo 11y ago

When this company can build a phone that won't crash, I'll believe they can build a car that won't crash. Until that day comes I feel like stern warnings of the coming economic revolution are not really in order.

arstin 11y ago

If Thrun is right about AI "outsmarting people in every dimension", how in the world could more entertaining job training videos organized into "nanodegrees" help us at all? I know this article was just a free ad for Udacity so he had to say self-serving things, but do you think the dude really believes this??? As others have pointed out, the real problem before us this century is to somehow decouple having a basic standard of living from performing work---more specifically from "contributing to productivity". My amateur guess is that even with our current state of food and energy production, the biggest barrier isn't the massively difficult economic and organizational problem, but advancing as a culture beyond our entrenched moral assumption that the means for basic living is something to be earned rather than a human right.