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While I don't agree with Lanier, being an AI skeptic isn't quite the same as saying that self driving cars can't happen: we don't yet have a good understanding

While I don't agree with Lanier, being an AI skeptic isn't quite the same as saying that self driving cars can't happen: we don't yet have a good understanding of either consciousness or tractable general optimization algorithms, so it's still possible that there's something that will make it impossible. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible. Also, your sarcasm about the self driving car might have been too subtle. ;)

ghaff 11y ago
What you see with respect to self-driving cars IMO is a lot of people who SO want them to exist that they assign timelines that are so optimistic they'd be rolling on the floor laughing if applied to projects they had direct familiarity with. Of course, it's also fueled by a lot of hype and hand-wavy statements about exponential growth and the like. Like many other aspects of AI, I'm not sure just about anyone thinks we need to have strong AI to make self-driving cars work under the vast majority of conditions. We "just" need to create automation that can handle a reasonable number of corner cases without flipping out or grinding to a halt. But that's a debate about engineering timelines not something more philosophical.
- randallsquared 11y ago
  I'm a little confused. We have self-driving cars. Of course there are still corner cases and bugs and regulatory issues, but cars have driven for fair distances on existing roads without a human driving. I had assumed, therefore, that the point @VLM was making was that, like self-driving cars, we already have AI by many of the standards of earlier AI researchers (the "when it works, it's not called AI any longer" argument).
  - ghaff 11y ago
    I was reading "self-driving cars" as "Level 4 autonomy" under general conditions. Which IMO is many decades away. But we're in violent agreement about the "when it works, it's not called AI any longer" argument.

ghaff 11y ago

What you see with respect to self-driving cars IMO is a lot of people who SO want them to exist that they assign timelines that are so optimistic they'd be rolling on the floor laughing if applied to projects they had direct familiarity with. Of course, it's also fueled by a lot of hype and hand-wavy statements about exponential growth and the like. Like many other aspects of AI, I'm not sure just about anyone thinks we need to have strong AI to make self-driving cars work under the vast majority of conditions. We "just" need to create automation that can handle a reasonable number of corner cases without flipping out or grinding to a halt. But that's a debate about engineering timelines not something more philosophical.

randallsquared 11y ago
I'm a little confused. We have self-driving cars. Of course there are still corner cases and bugs and regulatory issues, but cars have driven for fair distances on existing roads without a human driving. I had assumed, therefore, that the point @VLM was making was that, like self-driving cars, we already have AI by many of the standards of earlier AI researchers (the "when it works, it's not called AI any longer" argument).
- ghaff 11y ago
  I was reading "self-driving cars" as "Level 4 autonomy" under general conditions. Which IMO is many decades away. But we're in violent agreement about the "when it works, it's not called AI any longer" argument.