5 ms·

I don't understand why "otherwise smart people" feel the need to diminish the potential and successes of ML. When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed b

by xkemp 7y ago

I don't understand why "otherwise smart people" feel the need to diminish the potential and successes of ML. When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed brute force, with a sarcastic challenge to do Go, and we now the fate of that challenge. There used to be, on slashdot and I believe in the early days of HN, this running complaint of the new-at-the-time CSI-style shows, specifically the "enhance" trope: "you can't reconstruct a license plate from a bad frame in a video. That information is just lost. It's not there anymore", they would say, usually with all the aura of letting you in on a secret only a very smart mind could gleam, although there were five others in the same thread making this point. Today we have superresolution algorithms that can reconstruct license plates from low-res images. Turns out the information wasn't really lost, at least not in the sense applicable to the situation (i. e. you are allowed to train on other data). Many tech people dismiss such progress as "just statistics", but I haven't seen much of an attempt to find a definition of intelligence that is meaningful different from "just statistics". In fact I doubt it's possible within the realm of science, i. e. without resorting to mind-body dualism. As to driverless cars: they exist, right now. Google does thousands of miles without any need of human intervention. Yes, maybe it doesn't yet work well enough in a hailstorm. But predicting that these problems will endure for 50 years plus, against a combination of restricting these cars to certain situations, improving the models, and/or improving maps, seems at least as overconfident in your ability to make predictions as those made by self-driving optimists.

spookthesunset 7y ago
They exist now as what amounts to fancy amusement park rides. Wake me up when I can get sloppy drunk and catch one home. Only I was drunk and didn’t provide the exactly correct drop off address and need to somehow communicate to the robo-Uber where exactly it should drop me off... (how will I do that, by the way? talk to it? What if it doesn’t understand my accent?) Also, I’m at a wedding and the pickup is in a grass field in front of the venue. Can’t pick me up on pavement... it’s a two lane road 50mph road with no shoulder to pull over in. Also the entrance to the venue is a poorly marked dirt road. Also, the “pin” I told the robo-Uber to pick me up at has it at the street ‘cause that is the address. I’ll wait for the robo-Uber to call me on how the hell it should pull into the lot. I did mention cell sucks here, so hope you’ve got that all offline, right? And I fully expect my use case to be waved away as “edge case” and “doesn’t matter”. Except it does. Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  > Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype. For you. The semi-autonomy we have now- not "this vehicle will get me from point A to point B without need for intervention- but "this vehicle can take out some amount of the area between points A and B" is incredibly useful. I don't know how hard it is for you to keep going straight while fumbling about with a hamburger- I'm not that great at it- but if I can get a bot to help me steer in a relatively straight path and keep me in my lane while I take my jacket off because I'm beginning to sweat, send a message or place a call (having something make that easier is also useful), fire at an armed robber, or let me give more attention to a child who needs it, I will be safer.
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    Nice for you until the “self driving” car gets into an accident and kills the other driver. You don’t get 50% attention with driving. It’s either 100% or 0%. Anything other than that will put everybody else on the road at risk. If you are driving around in your Tesla using its adaptive cruise control and not paying attention to your driving... I can only hope the accident you will eventually cause hurts nobody but yourself.
    - jaxn 7y ago
      I have easily driven 12,000 miles under autopilot and regularly do the kind of tasks the parent described. Maybe I will have an accident and comments like this one will age poorly. Or maybe we will find that the scary technology wasn't as scary as first thought.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Your phone knows where your home is. What if the human doesn't understand your accent! > Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. That is not even remotely true. And you could have a fleet that's 80% or 90% robot. It's not hard. $5 discount if your end points aren't all wonky and robot-confusing.
Dylan16807 7y ago
> When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed brute force Deep blue was brute force. There are different ways to solve a problem, and only some of them are impressive in certain ways, even if they're impressive in other ways. > Today we have superresolution algorithms that can reconstruct license plates from low-res images. You need to take another look at CSI. You can reconstruct a little bit, usually with the help of multiple frames or exact font data. You can't do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_8ZH1Ggjk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_8ZH1Ggjk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoM5kfZIQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoM5kfZIQ0 > Many tech people dismiss such progress as "just statistics", but I haven't seen much of an attempt to find a definition of intelligence that is meaningful different from "just statistics". In fact I doubt it's possible within the realm of science, i. e. without resorting to mind-body dualism. That's about as useful as saying everything is 'just chemistry'. It's true but not helpful. And the same way that your brain and a science fair volcano are both just chemistry, demonstrating a simple reaction isn't impressive.

by xkemp 7y ago

spookthesunset 7y ago

They exist now as what amounts to fancy amusement park rides. Wake me up when I can get sloppy drunk and catch one home. Only I was drunk and didn’t provide the exactly correct drop off address and need to somehow communicate to the robo-Uber where exactly it should drop me off... (how will I do that, by the way? talk to it? What if it doesn’t understand my accent?) Also, I’m at a wedding and the pickup is in a grass field in front of the venue. Can’t pick me up on pavement... it’s a two lane road 50mph road with no shoulder to pull over in. Also the entrance to the venue is a poorly marked dirt road. Also, the “pin” I told the robo-Uber to pick me up at has it at the street ‘cause that is the address. I’ll wait for the robo-Uber to call me on how the hell it should pull into the lot. I did mention cell sucks here, so hope you’ve got that all offline, right? And I fully expect my use case to be waved away as “edge case” and “doesn’t matter”. Except it does. Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype.

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
> Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype. For you. The semi-autonomy we have now- not "this vehicle will get me from point A to point B without need for intervention- but "this vehicle can take out some amount of the area between points A and B" is incredibly useful. I don't know how hard it is for you to keep going straight while fumbling about with a hamburger- I'm not that great at it- but if I can get a bot to help me steer in a relatively straight path and keep me in my lane while I take my jacket off because I'm beginning to sweat, send a message or place a call (having something make that easier is also useful), fire at an armed robber, or let me give more attention to a child who needs it, I will be safer.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  Nice for you until the “self driving” car gets into an accident and kills the other driver. You don’t get 50% attention with driving. It’s either 100% or 0%. Anything other than that will put everybody else on the road at risk. If you are driving around in your Tesla using its adaptive cruise control and not paying attention to your driving... I can only hope the accident you will eventually cause hurts nobody but yourself.
  - jaxn 7y ago
    I have easily driven 12,000 miles under autopilot and regularly do the kind of tasks the parent described. Maybe I will have an accident and comments like this one will age poorly. Or maybe we will find that the scary technology wasn't as scary as first thought.
Dylan16807 7y ago
Your phone knows where your home is. What if the human doesn't understand your accent! > Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. That is not even remotely true. And you could have a fleet that's 80% or 90% robot. It's not hard. $5 discount if your end points aren't all wonky and robot-confusing.

Dylan16807 7y ago

> When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed brute force Deep blue was brute force. There are different ways to solve a problem, and only some of them are impressive in certain ways, even if they're impressive in other ways. > Today we have superresolution algorithms that can reconstruct license plates from low-res images. You need to take another look at CSI. You can reconstruct a little bit, usually with the help of multiple frames or exact font data. You can't do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_8ZH1Ggjk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_8ZH1Ggjk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoM5kfZIQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoM5kfZIQ0 > Many tech people dismiss such progress as "just statistics", but I haven't seen much of an attempt to find a definition of intelligence that is meaningful different from "just statistics". In fact I doubt it's possible within the realm of science, i. e. without resorting to mind-body dualism. That's about as useful as saying everything is 'just chemistry'. It's true but not helpful. And the same way that your brain and a science fair volcano are both just chemistry, demonstrating a simple reaction isn't impressive.