4 ms·

I can think of two scenario's that played out in my area fairly recently that AGI has no chance of dealing with (in the next decades at least): 1. There was a

I can think of two scenario's that played out in my area fairly recently that AGI has no chance of dealing with (in the next decades at least): 1. There was a burst water main on the country road near my house and when I got there the waterboard had not long arrived. There was a man stopping traffic and trying to get them to turn around on a tiny road. No GPS updates, no notifications prior to this, just a bunch of pissed-off drivers having to do a U-turn at the behest of this puny human telling them to go back. 2. Roadworks with a detour that didn't work properly: they had put one of the yellow "Detour" signs in the wrong place but since I knew the area, I went a different way. Will AGI even be able to read a detour sign and know what it is in reference to the journey I am currently trying to make? I love the concept of AI but it's an absoulte joke these days with everything claiming to be "AI"... case in point: I have been looking at headphones lately and found a pair (Sony I think!) that claimed to have AI to help noise cancelling! WTF? Even the reviews said that it only worked with constant noise like engines... so they invert the sound waves to cancel each other out? Where's the AI?

majewsky 7y ago
My main takeaway from your story is that fully autonomous driving requires a universal deployment of a system which allows police and emergency services to deploy updates to the road network map in real time. (Sure, it would be nicer if the car was intelligent enough to understand a man waving at it, but that's the lower bound that I take from these reports.)
- _Understated_ 7y ago
  Yep and the problem I have with that is that you can be sure it will be used for everything else including tracking my movements in real time and using them against me at some point or for insurance companies or some other org I don't currently know about.
- Ntrails 7y ago
  The builders blocking a road for a delivery of bricks are not emergency services. The Water company is not an emergency service. The actual emergency services do not have time to spend their time micro managing every ad hoc road blockage that will come about (and for damned sure someone will forget to turn the blockage off again). You are not going to get perfect centralised road status information for driving cars.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Right. Its complete narcissism when people think having the world bend to support their inferior AI is going to solve all these problems.
    - majewsky 7y ago
      100-150 years ago, the world bent hard to integrate cars into the existing traffic infrastructure. I don't see why we won't be able to adjust our infrastructure again to support new developments.
- pwinnski 7y ago
  More than once in Texas I've seen situations like the above-described in which the waving man was a civilian, no police involvement at all. I think that's the point of self-driving's limitations. There are many, many ways in which human drivers fail, to the tune of 35k dead per year. But there are also many, many, many ways in which human drivers handle situations safely that would result in self-driving cars either plowing straight ahead or stopping confused, either situation being worse than what happens today. I think these latter situations affect far more than 35k people per year. They might affect more than 35k people per day. Death vs inconvenience is an obvious trade, self-driving isn't all or nothing. Safety features like auto-stopping and lane-keeping probably reduce that 35k number dramatically if they're more widespread, without taking human hands off the wheel for the other situations.
ilaksh 7y ago
Those are rare circumstances. Self driving cars will be deployed when they are safely able to handle 99.9% of driving and they have ways to call home for instructions from remote monitors when they encounter a rare situation,who can then click on an interface to specify where to go. That's how Waymo does it currently.

majewsky 7y ago

My main takeaway from your story is that fully autonomous driving requires a universal deployment of a system which allows police and emergency services to deploy updates to the road network map in real time. (Sure, it would be nicer if the car was intelligent enough to understand a man waving at it, but that's the lower bound that I take from these reports.)

_Understated_ 7y ago
Yep and the problem I have with that is that you can be sure it will be used for everything else including tracking my movements in real time and using them against me at some point or for insurance companies or some other org I don't currently know about.
Ntrails 7y ago
The builders blocking a road for a delivery of bricks are not emergency services. The Water company is not an emergency service. The actual emergency services do not have time to spend their time micro managing every ad hoc road blockage that will come about (and for damned sure someone will forget to turn the blockage off again). You are not going to get perfect centralised road status information for driving cars.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Right. Its complete narcissism when people think having the world bend to support their inferior AI is going to solve all these problems.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    100-150 years ago, the world bent hard to integrate cars into the existing traffic infrastructure. I don't see why we won't be able to adjust our infrastructure again to support new developments.
pwinnski 7y ago
More than once in Texas I've seen situations like the above-described in which the waving man was a civilian, no police involvement at all. I think that's the point of self-driving's limitations. There are many, many ways in which human drivers fail, to the tune of 35k dead per year. But there are also many, many, many ways in which human drivers handle situations safely that would result in self-driving cars either plowing straight ahead or stopping confused, either situation being worse than what happens today. I think these latter situations affect far more than 35k people per year. They might affect more than 35k people per day. Death vs inconvenience is an obvious trade, self-driving isn't all or nothing. Safety features like auto-stopping and lane-keeping probably reduce that 35k number dramatically if they're more widespread, without taking human hands off the wheel for the other situations.

ilaksh 7y ago

Those are rare circumstances. Self driving cars will be deployed when they are safely able to handle 99.9% of driving and they have ways to call home for instructions from remote monitors when they encounter a rare situation,who can then click on an interface to specify where to go. That's how Waymo does it currently.