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Presumably, computers can get better at driving cars while humans cannot, so eventually computers will win this particular competition like they've won on chess

Presumably, computers can get better at driving cars while humans cannot, so eventually computers will win this particular competition like they've won on chess, go, and tons of other things.

Retra 9y ago
Chess and go are closed systems. And humans can get better at driving, especially if they have better tools. And really, if you want to maximize safety, you can just make cars safer and slower. Then it won't even matter how good of a driver you are. But what computers are good at is not getting drunk, tired, and distracted.
- roenxi 9y ago
  You have hit the mark. And it isn't just exceptional circumstances; there is a skill and expectation distribution amongst human drivers that can be eliminated here. We don't really care about the best human drivers. The challenge is preventing the worst human drivers from sitting behind the wheel and eliminating edge cases where an otherwise competent driver is not fit to drive due to some personal circumstance.
  - danso 9y ago
    To piggyback off what you said -- "best" is much harder to define in driving compared to chess and Go, because those games have a much more defined victory condition than does normal driving. How do you "win" at (non-competitive) driving? A driver with a 0% accident rate might not necessarily be better if they drove at a speed of 0.5 mph.
8bitsrule 9y ago
OTOH, I could reductio, humans can get better at language translation, while computers cannot. Think of it this way: driving is a translation problem.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  Why can’t computers get better at language translation?
  - btrettel 9y ago
    I translated many Russian scientific journal articles to English via Google Translate, and the improvements since 2015 are striking. A friend of mine pointed out that might be largely due to the corrections I provided. Either way.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      Well, I've been using Google translate to translate small sentences of Greek to English and back and the results have been consistently abysmally bad since the start (whenever that was- I can't say I remember; but before 2015 anyway).
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    Indeed, they demonstrably have over the last decade.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
Humans can get better at driving. Instructional campaigns, assistive technology, art, these things can all make ya better.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Sure, but when you fix a bug in the driving software you deploy it to all cars simultaneously. It's harder to teach all humans about a corner case you encountered only a couple of times.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Similarly, all your cars can decide slamming into a wall at full speed is a good idea; they all run the same software.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    In 2018 it is still easier to teach the humans as a point of fact.
- gboudrias 9y ago
  Ok but, isn't it fair to assume we're already doing everything we can in that regard? There's only so much energy we as a society can invest in making better drivers. AI seems to have no limit to speak of.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Ridiculously expensive for only a marginal improvement, and then people still have their hard wetware limits of concentration and reaction time. Machines have orders of magnitude better reaction time, are always 100% focused, and on aggregate, are much cheaper to teach.
  - joe_the_user 9y ago
    If society makes driving safety a priority, it can be made really, really safe. For example, school buses are the safest mode of transportation of any kind whatsoever in the US. Millions of kids ride naturally millions of miles per week and fatalities per year are usually in the single or double digits. Professional drivers, professionally maintained equipment and set procedures really are enough. Most accidents happen as some combination of people in bad mental states, equipment in bad conditions and bad stuff like weather. Remove that and driving is something people are pretty reliable at doing - especially, people don't really need faster reaction time 99% if they drive sensibly. http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/news-and-resources-school-bus-safety-rules.aspx http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/news-and-res...
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
Chess, go and tons of other board games. Outside of that very limited sort of activity, computers have "beat humans" in maybe machine vision and speech recognition, but then again only on very strictly defined challenges. And once the same (kinds of) systems are deployed in the wild all sorts of tiny little details emerge that suggest maybe the computers are not so ready to take over the world, yet. Like, oh, I don't know- adversarial examples fooling state-of-the-art machine vision systems, or speech recognition failing for all but a very few target languages etc.

Presumably, computers can get better at driving cars while humans cannot, so eventually computers will win this particular competition like they've won on chess, go, and tons of other things.

Retra 9y ago

Chess and go are closed systems. And humans can get better at driving, especially if they have better tools. And really, if you want to maximize safety, you can just make cars safer and slower. Then it won't even matter how good of a driver you are. But what computers are good at is not getting drunk, tired, and distracted.

roenxi 9y ago
You have hit the mark. And it isn't just exceptional circumstances; there is a skill and expectation distribution amongst human drivers that can be eliminated here. We don't really care about the best human drivers. The challenge is preventing the worst human drivers from sitting behind the wheel and eliminating edge cases where an otherwise competent driver is not fit to drive due to some personal circumstance.
- danso 9y ago
  To piggyback off what you said -- "best" is much harder to define in driving compared to chess and Go, because those games have a much more defined victory condition than does normal driving. How do you "win" at (non-competitive) driving? A driver with a 0% accident rate might not necessarily be better if they drove at a speed of 0.5 mph.

8bitsrule 9y ago

OTOH, I could reductio, humans can get better at language translation, while computers cannot. Think of it this way: driving is a translation problem.

mattnewton 9y ago
Why can’t computers get better at language translation?
- btrettel 9y ago
  I translated many Russian scientific journal articles to English via Google Translate, and the improvements since 2015 are striking. A friend of mine pointed out that might be largely due to the corrections I provided. Either way.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    Well, I've been using Google translate to translate small sentences of Greek to English and back and the results have been consistently abysmally bad since the start (whenever that was- I can't say I remember; but before 2015 anyway).
- Smaug123 9y ago
  Indeed, they demonstrably have over the last decade.

erikpukinskis 9y ago

Humans can get better at driving. Instructional campaigns, assistive technology, art, these things can all make ya better.

adrianN 9y ago
Sure, but when you fix a bug in the driving software you deploy it to all cars simultaneously. It's harder to teach all humans about a corner case you encountered only a couple of times.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Similarly, all your cars can decide slamming into a wall at full speed is a good idea; they all run the same software.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  In 2018 it is still easier to teach the humans as a point of fact.
gboudrias 9y ago
Ok but, isn't it fair to assume we're already doing everything we can in that regard? There's only so much energy we as a society can invest in making better drivers. AI seems to have no limit to speak of.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Ridiculously expensive for only a marginal improvement, and then people still have their hard wetware limits of concentration and reaction time. Machines have orders of magnitude better reaction time, are always 100% focused, and on aggregate, are much cheaper to teach.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  If society makes driving safety a priority, it can be made really, really safe. For example, school buses are the safest mode of transportation of any kind whatsoever in the US. Millions of kids ride naturally millions of miles per week and fatalities per year are usually in the single or double digits. Professional drivers, professionally maintained equipment and set procedures really are enough. Most accidents happen as some combination of people in bad mental states, equipment in bad conditions and bad stuff like weather. Remove that and driving is something people are pretty reliable at doing - especially, people don't really need faster reaction time 99% if they drive sensibly. http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/news-and-resources-school-bus-safety-rules.aspx http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/news-and-res...

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

Chess, go and tons of other board games. Outside of that very limited sort of activity, computers have "beat humans" in maybe machine vision and speech recognition, but then again only on very strictly defined challenges. And once the same (kinds of) systems are deployed in the wild all sorts of tiny little details emerge that suggest maybe the computers are not so ready to take over the world, yet. Like, oh, I don't know- adversarial examples fooling state-of-the-art machine vision systems, or speech recognition failing for all but a very few target languages etc.