3 ms·

He's saying driving is an AI-hard problem. From all the tasks that humans do we don't know which are AI-hard and which can be done by non sapient software, clas

He's saying driving is an AI-hard problem. From all the tasks that humans do we don't know which are AI-hard and which can be done by non sapient software, classifying problems is useful.

philwelch 8y ago
And I'm saying "AI-hard" isn't a great classification. Is there a known approach to AI that will result in some android who is can learn human languages and human abilities the same way human children do? Is there any reason to think that getting better and better and better at building self-driving cars or computer vision algorithms or any other AI application is going to magically result in some machine gaining "sapience" and somehow having the ability to do unrelated tasks? Is the contention that if someone does develop a self-driving car, that car will also be able to compose an opera or something if we let it? If we do have a self-driving car, should we try and teach it to write poetry or something? Would this car's failure to learn how to compose a sonnet falsify the contention that self-driving cars are "AI-hard"? To me this all sounds like some type of weird meatbag chauvinism, where it's absolutely impossible to perform any complicated task that a computer hasn't managed to do a good enough job of yet without resorting to building some sort of Commander Data in our image. And, while that may be true for such human abilities as "being able to do a wide variety of genuinely hard things if they are taught, especially at a really young age" or "arguing about abstract concepts we don't fully understand ourselves", driving a car is...well, it's not that hard. Human beings in car cultures learn to do it, but if those same human beings grew up in horse nomad cultures, they would learn to ride horses and shoot arrows from horseback really well, and if they grew up in a different culture they'd get a different skill. Being versatile enough to develop any of those skills given the right childhood experiences seems much harder than any one of those specific skills.

He's saying driving is an AI-hard problem. From all the tasks that humans do we don't know which are AI-hard and which can be done by non sapient software, classifying problems is useful.

philwelch 8y ago

And I'm saying "AI-hard" isn't a great classification. Is there a known approach to AI that will result in some android who is can learn human languages and human abilities the same way human children do? Is there any reason to think that getting better and better and better at building self-driving cars or computer vision algorithms or any other AI application is going to magically result in some machine gaining "sapience" and somehow having the ability to do unrelated tasks? Is the contention that if someone does develop a self-driving car, that car will also be able to compose an opera or something if we let it? If we do have a self-driving car, should we try and teach it to write poetry or something? Would this car's failure to learn how to compose a sonnet falsify the contention that self-driving cars are "AI-hard"? To me this all sounds like some type of weird meatbag chauvinism, where it's absolutely impossible to perform any complicated task that a computer hasn't managed to do a good enough job of yet without resorting to building some sort of Commander Data in our image. And, while that may be true for such human abilities as "being able to do a wide variety of genuinely hard things if they are taught, especially at a really young age" or "arguing about abstract concepts we don't fully understand ourselves", driving a car is...well, it's not that hard. Human beings in car cultures learn to do it, but if those same human beings grew up in horse nomad cultures, they would learn to ride horses and shoot arrows from horseback really well, and if they grew up in a different culture they'd get a different skill. Being versatile enough to develop any of those skills given the right childhood experiences seems much harder than any one of those specific skills.