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In the same sense that any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon. Which is technically correct but a useless observation. If

In the same sense that any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon. Which is technically correct but a useless observation. If we use a more narrow definition of weapon, e.g. a tool optimized for the primary purpose of injuring or killing people then it certainly is not a weapon.

titzer 8y ago
> any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon Any object that can be remotely programmed to drive itself at high velocity into a target, yes.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> In the same sense that any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon. Which is technically correct but a useless observation. It's not useless; the damage that can be caused varies by degree between things. Then you have to look at two cases - suitability for object to be used as a weapon, and the damage it can cause on accident. Unlike knives or hammers, both those factors are very high for cars. The fact how dangerous cars is is very much underappreciated by people in general, as evidenced by the number of morons on the road. We already lose hundreds of people daily in the US alone because of this; now we're trying to add another class of drivers into the mix - algorithms written by greedy optimizers caring primarily for short-term profit and being first to market. This should give us some pause. I'm not saying this technology is not possible or not wonderful, but I think the current ecology of self-driving efforts is unhealthy. We have a for-profit race by companies, many of which can't be trusted with getting software right, and most (all?) of them pursuing self-driving capabilities by means of half-understood brute-force black boxes the neural networks are.
- Nae3Au5x 8y ago
  I was quibbling about semantics. I am aware that cars can be dangerous. > and the damage it can cause on accident You are conflating (un)safety of a tool used in the way it is intended (kitchen knife = cutting a steak) with accidents (cutting a finger) and with malicious use (stabbing people). Those three categories are not the same for object-that-may-act-as-weapon and object-designed-as-weapon. Conflating them collapses the number useful things we can communicate. So are you concerned about Tesla intentionally building killing instruments? Or potential for accidents? Or the potential for intentional misuse? > The fact how dangerous cars is is very much underappreciated by people in general, as evidenced by the number of morons on the road. Cars also provide immense utility. If all they did were providing the thrill of speeding then they would probably be banned as too dangerous. One of the tradeoffs is the overhead of enabling people to drive. We could drive down the number of morons by requiring astronaut training for vehicle operators but again, that tradeoff seems too harsh and it's more efficient to occasionally let people die in traffic accidents than letting them die because nobody qualified as ambulance driver. > We have a for-profit race by companies, many of which can't be trusted with getting software right In the short term this may cause more deaths than necessary. But on the other hand it might be the quickest way to find a winner and then hold the rest to the same standard. As long as the experimental fleets are small they are just a blip in the statistics. Right now they should be equated to the yearly batch of first-year drivers who have an inherently higher risk profile due to lack of experience. We still accept them on our roads in the expectation that they improve. What is important is to make sure that they are as good as or better than humans once they roll out in large fleets.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > So are you concerned about Tesla intentionally building killing instruments? Or potential for accidents? Or the potential for intentional misuse? The latter two. > We could drive down the number of morons by requiring astronaut training for vehicle operators but again, that tradeoff seems too harsh and it's more efficient to occasionally let people die in traffic accidents than letting them die because nobody qualified as ambulance driver. I don't think this is the real reason. You don't need astronaut-level training for vehicle operators, just more than the ridiculously low standard of today, and more importantly, much stronger and harsher enforcement of traffic laws. I doubt that this will reduce the number of qualified ambulance drivers. I suspect the real reason we tolerate so many morons on the road is path dependence. When cars first appeared, they were rare, slow and safe. In the couple of decades it took to get to the present density and speed of cars, it became a social status symbol, and something politically impossible to rein in. > What is important is to make sure that they are as good as or better than humans once they roll out in large fleets. I'm afraid that with self-driving tech based on neural networks, with no ability to inspect and verify what's going on, we'll eventually have to eat the risk and roll them out in large numbers before we know they're as good as humans.
    - scoti 8y ago
      I agree with your general sentiment overall. I do not agree that neural networks are a "black box" with "no ability to inspect and verify". Even putting aside the many methods to understand what a neural network is doing without running it, at core, neural networks are well tested instruments. That's how they learn-- by testing themselves. Obviously it's possible for a neural network to have odd behavior in circumstances not accounted for but that was always going to be possible at the level of complexity we're talking about here. We're talking about cutting edge technology here -- and I agree with your general sentiment. I just don't agree with pinning the blame on "... based on neural networks". The same factors would apply to any codebase of this complexity.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > Even putting aside the many methods to understand what a neural network is doing without running it Name three :). > neural networks are well tested instruments. That's how they learn-- by testing themselves. Last I checked, neural networks are well-tested in a sense that if you throw a big database and a shit ton of compute at them, they'll learn to accurately work within that database. Step out of it, and all bets are off. We're better at this than we were 30 years ago - good enough to apply this technology to consumer-level products in which mistakes don't really matter. I'd be wary of applying even current neural networks to safety-critical tasks. > Obviously it's possible for a neural network to have odd behavior in circumstances not accounted for but that was always going to be possible at the level of complexity we're talking about here. The problem is that with NNs, the odd behavior is usually totally unexpected, and you can't really inspect the network beforehand to discover the possible ranges of error-generating inputs. Everything works fine but every now and then you get a patterned sofa classified as a zebra, or a car + little noise classified as a toaster. And then there's no obvious relation between multiple misclassifications, because the reasoning structure of the neural network is implicitly encoded in its weights. > The same factors would apply to any codebase of this complexity. I think there's a fundamental qualitative difference here. A codebase can be complex, but ultimately it has a structure, and usually (in case of ML) represents a well-understood mathematical structure. Neural networks have simple code, and the whole complexity is hidden in opaque matrices of numbers, where even single changes usually have global effects. I'm not trying to dismiss NNs in general; I just don't trust them in applications where health and safety is at stake.
jaggederest 8y ago
As a modification of the Kzinti Lesson: A vehicle is a weapon in direct proportion to it's effectiveness as a vehicle.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

titzer 8y ago

> any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon Any object that can be remotely programmed to drive itself at high velocity into a target, yes.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> In the same sense that any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon. Which is technically correct but a useless observation. It's not useless; the damage that can be caused varies by degree between things. Then you have to look at two cases - suitability for object to be used as a weapon, and the damage it can cause on accident. Unlike knives or hammers, both those factors are very high for cars. The fact how dangerous cars is is very much underappreciated by people in general, as evidenced by the number of morons on the road. We already lose hundreds of people daily in the US alone because of this; now we're trying to add another class of drivers into the mix - algorithms written by greedy optimizers caring primarily for short-term profit and being first to market. This should give us some pause. I'm not saying this technology is not possible or not wonderful, but I think the current ecology of self-driving efforts is unhealthy. We have a for-profit race by companies, many of which can't be trusted with getting software right, and most (all?) of them pursuing self-driving capabilities by means of half-understood brute-force black boxes the neural networks are.

Nae3Au5x 8y ago
I was quibbling about semantics. I am aware that cars can be dangerous. > and the damage it can cause on accident You are conflating (un)safety of a tool used in the way it is intended (kitchen knife = cutting a steak) with accidents (cutting a finger) and with malicious use (stabbing people). Those three categories are not the same for object-that-may-act-as-weapon and object-designed-as-weapon. Conflating them collapses the number useful things we can communicate. So are you concerned about Tesla intentionally building killing instruments? Or potential for accidents? Or the potential for intentional misuse? > The fact how dangerous cars is is very much underappreciated by people in general, as evidenced by the number of morons on the road. Cars also provide immense utility. If all they did were providing the thrill of speeding then they would probably be banned as too dangerous. One of the tradeoffs is the overhead of enabling people to drive. We could drive down the number of morons by requiring astronaut training for vehicle operators but again, that tradeoff seems too harsh and it's more efficient to occasionally let people die in traffic accidents than letting them die because nobody qualified as ambulance driver. > We have a for-profit race by companies, many of which can't be trusted with getting software right In the short term this may cause more deaths than necessary. But on the other hand it might be the quickest way to find a winner and then hold the rest to the same standard. As long as the experimental fleets are small they are just a blip in the statistics. Right now they should be equated to the yearly batch of first-year drivers who have an inherently higher risk profile due to lack of experience. We still accept them on our roads in the expectation that they improve. What is important is to make sure that they are as good as or better than humans once they roll out in large fleets.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > So are you concerned about Tesla intentionally building killing instruments? Or potential for accidents? Or the potential for intentional misuse? The latter two. > We could drive down the number of morons by requiring astronaut training for vehicle operators but again, that tradeoff seems too harsh and it's more efficient to occasionally let people die in traffic accidents than letting them die because nobody qualified as ambulance driver. I don't think this is the real reason. You don't need astronaut-level training for vehicle operators, just more than the ridiculously low standard of today, and more importantly, much stronger and harsher enforcement of traffic laws. I doubt that this will reduce the number of qualified ambulance drivers. I suspect the real reason we tolerate so many morons on the road is path dependence. When cars first appeared, they were rare, slow and safe. In the couple of decades it took to get to the present density and speed of cars, it became a social status symbol, and something politically impossible to rein in. > What is important is to make sure that they are as good as or better than humans once they roll out in large fleets. I'm afraid that with self-driving tech based on neural networks, with no ability to inspect and verify what's going on, we'll eventually have to eat the risk and roll them out in large numbers before we know they're as good as humans.
  - scoti 8y ago
    I agree with your general sentiment overall. I do not agree that neural networks are a "black box" with "no ability to inspect and verify". Even putting aside the many methods to understand what a neural network is doing without running it, at core, neural networks are well tested instruments. That's how they learn-- by testing themselves. Obviously it's possible for a neural network to have odd behavior in circumstances not accounted for but that was always going to be possible at the level of complexity we're talking about here. We're talking about cutting edge technology here -- and I agree with your general sentiment. I just don't agree with pinning the blame on "... based on neural networks". The same factors would apply to any codebase of this complexity.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > Even putting aside the many methods to understand what a neural network is doing without running it Name three :). > neural networks are well tested instruments. That's how they learn-- by testing themselves. Last I checked, neural networks are well-tested in a sense that if you throw a big database and a shit ton of compute at them, they'll learn to accurately work within that database. Step out of it, and all bets are off. We're better at this than we were 30 years ago - good enough to apply this technology to consumer-level products in which mistakes don't really matter. I'd be wary of applying even current neural networks to safety-critical tasks. > Obviously it's possible for a neural network to have odd behavior in circumstances not accounted for but that was always going to be possible at the level of complexity we're talking about here. The problem is that with NNs, the odd behavior is usually totally unexpected, and you can't really inspect the network beforehand to discover the possible ranges of error-generating inputs. Everything works fine but every now and then you get a patterned sofa classified as a zebra, or a car + little noise classified as a toaster. And then there's no obvious relation between multiple misclassifications, because the reasoning structure of the neural network is implicitly encoded in its weights. > The same factors would apply to any codebase of this complexity. I think there's a fundamental qualitative difference here. A codebase can be complex, but ultimately it has a structure, and usually (in case of ML) represents a well-understood mathematical structure. Neural networks have simple code, and the whole complexity is hidden in opaque matrices of numbers, where even single changes usually have global effects. I'm not trying to dismiss NNs in general; I just don't trust them in applications where health and safety is at stake.

jaggederest 8y ago

As a modification of the Kzinti Lesson: A vehicle is a weapon in direct proportion to it's effectiveness as a vehicle.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]