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Maybe I'm ignorant (very likely) but I've never understood the difference between full autonomous driving and a fully intelligent AI. If a car can drive in any

by tabeth 9y ago

Maybe I'm ignorant (very likely) but I've never understood the difference between full autonomous driving and a fully intelligent AI. If a car can drive in any environment and react to any circumstances surely said AI could also do anything else, no? EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone. Though, to clarify, when I think of "full autonomous" driving, I'm thinking of a car that can go from A to B regardless of the context. Meaning, if some of it is offroad it'll handle that, if there's traffic that'll be handled. If there's something wrong with itself, aka the car, it'll be introspective and call for assistance, sending its location, etc. Not just following marks on a road and pulling over and giving up if it can't get there. Also, I do not think a "fully intelligent AI" can necessarily solve any problem, but is capable of learning such that it could. I the purposes of a discussion I'd equate it to maybe a 5 year old.

arkitaip 9y ago
Driving is just a tiny subset of what a general AI could do. In the grand scheme of things to which AI could occupy itself with, it's an absolutely trivial undertaking.
ep103 9y ago
nope. Because they're not building something that has decision making or consciousness. What they're building is a very complicated and nuanced math equation, that reads along the lines of: when a camera sees a line of X whiteness at Y distance, and we are travelling at speed Z, in this geographic region, turn the wheel left E percent. What these companies are doing is trying to calibrate such an equation so well, that it can successfully navigate roads on its own.
senatorobama 9y ago
So true. I've always thought that fully autonomous driving is a slippery slope to AGI. Imagine Google having to collect an INFINITE amount of driving data (the perfect manifold) before they realize they've sunk billions into an intractable problem?! Problems in AI can very easily turn into a black hole of money and data. I hope the large number of AI startups appreciate this.
CabSauce 9y ago
The difference is that the same algorithm that drives a car can't be used to do other tasks. The self-driving car algorithm can't just be plugged in to recommend a movie or summarize an article. Many of the same underlying components can be re-used, but they have to be trained on data for the new task. AI is kind of a silly term, imo.
nip 9y ago
I do not think that a 'fully intelligent AI' is necessary for full autonomous driving: if a universal communication protocol for driving were to be introduced, cars could communicate with one another as well as announce themselves when entering intersections for example, therefore mitigating the need for an 'AI'. "I am driving at 45mph at [GPS Coordinates] [UTC Timestamp]". "I'm braking [GPS Coordinates] [UTC Timestamp]".
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  And then an unequipped vehicle comes along; or worse, one broadcasting with malicious intent.
brianwawok 9y ago
Can you imagine writing a computer program than can drive a car in a video game, but not provide relationship advice to two freshly married people, or think of a fair and just and enforceable law to reduce discrimination at the workplace? Driving is quite a bit short of "same intelligence as humans"
- damontal 9y ago
  what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Do you think we will tolerate autonomous cars operating at speeds that create those situations?
    - damontal 9y ago
      if someone steps out in front your car going 30 MPH can you stop in time? i mean they walk right into your immediate path. do you think this kind of thing can't happen?
      - maxerickson 9y ago
        That isn't the problem you posed. Now there is no maneuver that can save the pedestrian, for any driver. But for the most part, if there is low visibility and pedestrian proximity, 30 MPH is too fast. The streets here don't have much obstructing visibility other than parked cars, there are good sidewalks set well back from the streets and the speed limit is still 25 MPH.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    The exact same thing that happens now: someone dies, usually selected arbitrarily based upon the driver's selfish desire to minimize harm to themselves. Because that situation doesn't allow enough time to make anything except instinctual choices. The driver is found at fault for that death if they were not driving legally. Otherwise, and very often times regardless, the whole thing is written off as a tragic accident (millions happen every year, just in the USA), and the insurance people do their thing. Ethical dilemmas are a non-problem for self-driving cars.
Robotbeat 9y ago
Not fully intelligent. More like animal intelligence, and a subset of that. No off-roading (which animals have no problem with).
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I have to account for offroading animals while I drive/bike because deer love to sit on the edge of a road, and inexplicably leap in front of me at the last second or if I see some crossing the road ahead, know I have to slow down just in case it has some deer in the pack behind it that are following or the deer changes its mind because it doesn't want me to be in between it and it's herd to go back where they came from. This can involve scaling what appears to be a ten foot almost vertical wall of rock. Fawns will often wait until you get right next to them before moving because their defense mechanism is sitting still and hoping to not get noticed. So automated cars need to know what deer look like and how they behave since they are so common. Very occassionally I've had to avoid mountain lions and bobcats but based on road kill I've seen most people just drive over bobcats.
beagleman 9y ago
As others have said, the scope of 'Anything that can happen on a road', while large, is a lot smaller than 'Anything that can happen or be imagined to happen'. Moreover, if a pilot AI finds itself in a situation it can't deal with, the failsafe of "hazards on, slow the car and pull over" is nearly always available. There's not really an equivalent for a general AI.
jholloway7 9y ago
Think about the difference between a specialized AI that can beat a grandmaster at chess (using heuristics) versus a generalized AI that can learn how to play chess and then figure out how to beat a grandmaster on its own.
david-cako 9y ago
The comparison to animal intelligence is apt. Animals are very good at responding to specific situations with fixed action patterns. Humans are very good at adapting to new situations by training new action patterns. Self driving cars tread far more in the territory of machine learning than AI. AI involves ML, but ML doesn't necessarily involve proper AI. ML is essentially creating a framework of existing data that the computer can apply to similar situations. This is why you hear terminology like "training a dataset" in ML -- you are just telling it to act upon new situations in as similar of a capacity as possible to previous situations. AI to me is a very different thing, in that it doesn't require structured inputs and outputs. Even as chaotic as autonomous driving is, it's still a structured system that takes inputs about road rules and surrounding objects and aligns the car with an outcome where it follows road rules and doesn't hit anything. True AI is a machine that can reason for itself in unstructured situations, which would likely involve ML that is very good at making inferences about how existing data applies to tangentially related situations. I'm sure at some point there will be a distinction between AI that aims to create outcomes as similar as possible to human decision making (perhaps it could be trained by you to make decisions the way you would), and AI that aims to emulate human thought process literally down to the neurotransmitter level.

by tabeth 9y ago

arkitaip 9y ago

Driving is just a tiny subset of what a general AI could do. In the grand scheme of things to which AI could occupy itself with, it's an absolutely trivial undertaking.

ep103 9y ago

nope. Because they're not building something that has decision making or consciousness. What they're building is a very complicated and nuanced math equation, that reads along the lines of: when a camera sees a line of X whiteness at Y distance, and we are travelling at speed Z, in this geographic region, turn the wheel left E percent. What these companies are doing is trying to calibrate such an equation so well, that it can successfully navigate roads on its own.

senatorobama 9y ago

So true. I've always thought that fully autonomous driving is a slippery slope to AGI. Imagine Google having to collect an INFINITE amount of driving data (the perfect manifold) before they realize they've sunk billions into an intractable problem?! Problems in AI can very easily turn into a black hole of money and data. I hope the large number of AI startups appreciate this.

CabSauce 9y ago

The difference is that the same algorithm that drives a car can't be used to do other tasks. The self-driving car algorithm can't just be plugged in to recommend a movie or summarize an article. Many of the same underlying components can be re-used, but they have to be trained on data for the new task. AI is kind of a silly term, imo.

nip 9y ago

I do not think that a 'fully intelligent AI' is necessary for full autonomous driving: if a universal communication protocol for driving were to be introduced, cars could communicate with one another as well as announce themselves when entering intersections for example, therefore mitigating the need for an 'AI'. "I am driving at 45mph at [GPS Coordinates] [UTC Timestamp]". "I'm braking [GPS Coordinates] [UTC Timestamp]".

Piskvorrr 9y ago
And then an unequipped vehicle comes along; or worse, one broadcasting with malicious intent.

brianwawok 9y ago

Can you imagine writing a computer program than can drive a car in a video game, but not provide relationship advice to two freshly married people, or think of a fair and just and enforceable law to reduce discrimination at the workplace? Driving is quite a bit short of "same intelligence as humans"

damontal 9y ago
what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Do you think we will tolerate autonomous cars operating at speeds that create those situations?
  - damontal 9y ago
    if someone steps out in front your car going 30 MPH can you stop in time? i mean they walk right into your immediate path. do you think this kind of thing can't happen?
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      That isn't the problem you posed. Now there is no maneuver that can save the pedestrian, for any driver. But for the most part, if there is low visibility and pedestrian proximity, 30 MPH is too fast. The streets here don't have much obstructing visibility other than parked cars, there are good sidewalks set well back from the streets and the speed limit is still 25 MPH.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  The exact same thing that happens now: someone dies, usually selected arbitrarily based upon the driver's selfish desire to minimize harm to themselves. Because that situation doesn't allow enough time to make anything except instinctual choices. The driver is found at fault for that death if they were not driving legally. Otherwise, and very often times regardless, the whole thing is written off as a tragic accident (millions happen every year, just in the USA), and the insurance people do their thing. Ethical dilemmas are a non-problem for self-driving cars.

Robotbeat 9y ago

Not fully intelligent. More like animal intelligence, and a subset of that. No off-roading (which animals have no problem with).

stevenwoo 9y ago
I have to account for offroading animals while I drive/bike because deer love to sit on the edge of a road, and inexplicably leap in front of me at the last second or if I see some crossing the road ahead, know I have to slow down just in case it has some deer in the pack behind it that are following or the deer changes its mind because it doesn't want me to be in between it and it's herd to go back where they came from. This can involve scaling what appears to be a ten foot almost vertical wall of rock. Fawns will often wait until you get right next to them before moving because their defense mechanism is sitting still and hoping to not get noticed. So automated cars need to know what deer look like and how they behave since they are so common. Very occassionally I've had to avoid mountain lions and bobcats but based on road kill I've seen most people just drive over bobcats.

beagleman 9y ago

As others have said, the scope of 'Anything that can happen on a road', while large, is a lot smaller than 'Anything that can happen or be imagined to happen'. Moreover, if a pilot AI finds itself in a situation it can't deal with, the failsafe of "hazards on, slow the car and pull over" is nearly always available. There's not really an equivalent for a general AI.

jholloway7 9y ago

Think about the difference between a specialized AI that can beat a grandmaster at chess (using heuristics) versus a generalized AI that can learn how to play chess and then figure out how to beat a grandmaster on its own.

david-cako 9y ago

The comparison to animal intelligence is apt. Animals are very good at responding to specific situations with fixed action patterns. Humans are very good at adapting to new situations by training new action patterns. Self driving cars tread far more in the territory of machine learning than AI. AI involves ML, but ML doesn't necessarily involve proper AI. ML is essentially creating a framework of existing data that the computer can apply to similar situations. This is why you hear terminology like "training a dataset" in ML -- you are just telling it to act upon new situations in as similar of a capacity as possible to previous situations. AI to me is a very different thing, in that it doesn't require structured inputs and outputs. Even as chaotic as autonomous driving is, it's still a structured system that takes inputs about road rules and surrounding objects and aligns the car with an outcome where it follows road rules and doesn't hit anything. True AI is a machine that can reason for itself in unstructured situations, which would likely involve ML that is very good at making inferences about how existing data applies to tangentially related situations. I'm sure at some point there will be a distinction between AI that aims to create outcomes as similar as possible to human decision making (perhaps it could be trained by you to make decisions the way you would), and AI that aims to emulate human thought process literally down to the neurotransmitter level.