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Driving in Mountain View just isn't that representative of a lot of the US, much less of the world. You'll never have training data that covers every scenario

Driving in Mountain View just isn't that representative of a lot of the US, much less of the world. You'll never have training data that covers every scenario as we're constantly creating new ones -- from spray painted temporary signage to unclear directions from police officers to random obstacles that force breaking rules to navigate around. 20 years sounds pretty optimistic to me.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Why does some people assume the technology will start standing still when it has advanced so far in just the last 5 years? None of those problems are insurmountable, when the tech stops getting better, maybe you’ll have a point. 20 years is incredibly pessimistic to me. Heck, we might even have GAI by then.
- anyfoo 7y ago
  Why do you assume that those "little" problems that stand in the way are surmountable with any realistic rate of advancement in technology? Because some ill-defined "amount" x of advancement has happened in the last 5 years, so in 10 years it will be 2 times x? Some problems are really hard, some are essentially impossible. For example, the halting problem is impossible to solve. All its corollaries are, too: You cannot for arbitrary cases tell whether a C program adds two simple numbers together, period. Voice Assistants are an example for "problems so hard, they are essentially impossible": A human housemate has no problem understanding what I mean when I say "it went yellow, can you order this time?", a voice assistant likely never will. If it can understand that one, it cannot understand another way to phrase it that I can come up immediately. It might get good enough to unambiguously understand "order the water filters for the fridge" every time, but I can convey the same thing to a human in infinitely many more ways. In driving, unfortunately, you don't get to choose which way a situation is presented, the way you can with crafting a sentence to a Voice Assistant. The next time you drive through a city, look out for any even remotely non-standard situation. Now imagine how a computer should be supposed to react without the arsenal of context clues that your lifetime of human experience provides to you, and that tells you to "just swerve left after slowing down for a few feet" with barely a conscious thought.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Why does some people assume the technology will start standing still when it has advanced so far in just the last 5 years? None of those problems are insurmountable, when the tech stops getting better, maybe you’ll have a point. 20 years is incredibly pessimistic to me. Heck, we might even have GAI by then.

anyfoo 7y ago
Why do you assume that those "little" problems that stand in the way are surmountable with any realistic rate of advancement in technology? Because some ill-defined "amount" x of advancement has happened in the last 5 years, so in 10 years it will be 2 times x? Some problems are really hard, some are essentially impossible. For example, the halting problem is impossible to solve. All its corollaries are, too: You cannot for arbitrary cases tell whether a C program adds two simple numbers together, period. Voice Assistants are an example for "problems so hard, they are essentially impossible": A human housemate has no problem understanding what I mean when I say "it went yellow, can you order this time?", a voice assistant likely never will. If it can understand that one, it cannot understand another way to phrase it that I can come up immediately. It might get good enough to unambiguously understand "order the water filters for the fridge" every time, but I can convey the same thing to a human in infinitely many more ways. In driving, unfortunately, you don't get to choose which way a situation is presented, the way you can with crafting a sentence to a Voice Assistant. The next time you drive through a city, look out for any even remotely non-standard situation. Now imagine how a computer should be supposed to react without the arsenal of context clues that your lifetime of human experience provides to you, and that tells you to "just swerve left after slowing down for a few feet" with barely a conscious thought.