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> After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, we are not closer to total situational awareness through a computerized brain than we were
by richk449 5y ago
> After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, we are not closer to total situational awareness through a computerized brain than we were in the 1970s.
Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970.
The article makes the usual complaints about self driving cars:
> Despite $16 billion in investment from the heavy hitters of Silicon Valley, we are decades away from self-driving cars.
Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s. And we are not decades away from self-driving cars - Waymo runs self driving cars today in very specific locations.
Wondering if this article is written by GTP-3.
- zepto 5y ago> Waymo runs self driving cars today in very specific locations. Specific locations where the streets are practically tracks.
- grp000 5y agoPhoenix is laid out on a grid, but you can hardly call the streets "tracks".
- fungiblecog 5y agoSelf-driving cars are much much better, but they are not "intelligent" in any sense of that word
- solipsism 5y agoFor your personal, idiosyncratic definition of "intelligent".
- fungiblecog 5y agoIn the sense that an intelligent thing can react sensibly to situations outside of those explicitly known about in advance
- rcxdude 5y agoWaymo has some excellent examples of their car reacting to strange unforseen situations appropriately. You're going to need to be more specific.
- Scarblac 5y ago"Intelligence" is anything that humans can do but we don't know how to make computers do. Once computers can do it, it's "mere computation".
- vagrantJin 5y agoI doubt we'd call locomotion and reaction to sensory feedback intelligent. Even single cell organisms are well and truly capable of that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dtech 5y agoWhat self-driving cars do is closer to something an animal like a deer does, not something a bacterium does. And you'd generally say a deer uses some intelligence while moving.
- vagrantJin 5y agoDeer? Ey, you've just jumped several orders of magnitude of multicellular complexity. Earthworm intelligence at best.
- Scarblac 5y agoSo can single cell organisms drive cars? Because otherwise I don't see your point.
- vagrantJin 5y agoTo answer your question. No. Single cells organisms can't drive cars. A multicellular organism can. We are talking about self driving AI as a system - inputs and outputs and it's relative complexity. I mapped that system complexity to single cell motility.
- paulcole 5y agoLet’s say you and I were going to race each other by walking. You start on the east side of Los Angeles and I’m in Santa Monica. Does your lead mean you’re in a much better position than me? What if the finish line is in Amsterdam? That’s how I see AI (particularly self driving tech) today. Yes, technically there’s been advancements but we don’t even know whether it’s possible to get to the finish line today.
- richk449 5y ago> Let’s say you and I were going to race each other by walking. You start on the east side of Los Angeles and I’m in Santa Monica. Does your lead mean you’re in a much better position than me? What if the finish line is in Amsterdam? I can't figure out how to parse this. You refer to my starting location as a "lead", but they ask if it means I am in a better position - that is the definition of "lead". I think your point is that we are so far from what is needed that it is hard to know if we are even moving in the right direction. Which is a weird argument. My brother drove me in his Nissan Rogue today, which does automatic lane following. You don't have to steer your car, or use the gas or brake for many driving conditions. That is unambiguously an improvement over full manual control.
- icoder 5y agoIt's an improvement in what it does now, but I think the point is it is not necessarily bringing the end goal closer. Like a side track that runs dead at some point. No matter how much faster horses may have had become by selective breeding, that did not bring 100km/h travel closer.
- martin_a 5y agoWith regards to autonomous driving, improvements like this absolutely bring us closer to the end goal. Each improvement in adaptive cruise controls, lane following/holding assistants and any other partly-autonomous assistance system does its part in acquiring experience and technology for "the end goal".
- 5y ago
- js8 5y ago> Wondering if this article is written by GTP-3. FYI, it was written by a woman. I looked up her book, Kill It with Fire, and as a mainframer I have to say it seems pretty interesting. I think what she alludes to in this essay, though, is more like that AI cannot solve socioeconomic problems of humans. And even humans seem to struggle with it. Whenever I read stories where the metrics became the targets, and the like, I am reminded of Varoufakis' book Economic Indeterminacy. He doesn't give any answers there, but there is this "strange loop" in rationalism that nobody really understands. I also think that AI might be a wrong target, because you need to understand the problem before you can solve it, and once humans understand the problem, they don't need AI anymore, they just code the solution as an algorithm. On the other hand, if humans don't fully understand the problem, it's extremely difficult (except artificial circumstances like games) to explain to AI what the problem is, so it would arrive at a "reasonable" solution (and avoided, at the very least, killing all humans).
- soco 5y agoIf we can't understand the problem, will we be able to understand the solution presented by that AI? Or we'd just apply it, trusting blindly the unfathomable reasons the AI used? Do we have an AI where the decision tree can be grasped by humans?
- lokischild 5y agoIt seems inevitable to me the moment AI capacity seriously surpasses human (as a whole) capacity in any specific topic, it becomes an oracle. I hear of efforts to translate machine decision making to human understandable terms, but if it is a question of raw intelligence, it will quickly become impossible to understand.
- js8 5y agoThis is a topic of Lem's novel/essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV. And to be honest, I wondered about that with GPT-3. Maybe it could give a more profound answer to a given prompt, but it chose not to, since it found the prompt to be too silly, and it responded in kind. Just like adults are able to entertain an imaginary universe of children. So even to explain that we want a "serious" answer might be difficult.
- mjburgess 5y ago> Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s Therein lies the problem. Your definition of intelligence presumes that it is a simple quantitative scale, measuring I guess, something like "system complexity". The relevant sense here, in which no progress has been made, is qualitative -- ie., it is a distinct property. And this property has not been acquired. What is the property? It is dynamical, not formal. It is more like gravity (, pregnancy) than it is like addition. It is the ability many animals have of adaption in the shifting and challenging environments in which they are embedded. That type of adaption is not formal: it is not adaption in the sense of "updating a weight parameter". Rather, of the cells of their bodies coordinating themselves differently, and thus of their tissues, and thus of their organs, and thus of their whole brain-body system. Both from a top-down command ("I want to run now, and so my cells...") and from a bottom-up ("my cells... so I ..."). What enables animals to be fully embedded in their physical environment, to cope and adapt to its radical shifts, is this capacity. The type of "crossword puzzle" "intelligence" we obsess with is entirely derivative of this more basic --and vastly more powerful -- intelligence. Cognition is just a semi-formal process, parasitical on the body's intelligence; whose role is simply to notice when it fails and problem-solve it. We have, at best, merely the architecture of this formal reasoning. But there is still nothing for it to reason about. And in this sense, computer science has made no progress -- and indeed, cannot. It is not a formal problem.
- soco 5y agoYou have a valid point here. But it might be that for practical reasons the progress in that direction won't be needed. Like, brute forcing it might be enough to reach a level higher than we can grasp. And if we can't grasp it, it's all Greek to us anyway...
- mjburgess 5y agoThe problem with brute forcing is it requires data from the future. Physics can be solved with statistics, but only from God's POV. The future, absent information about it, is too open to solve by merely constraining models by past example cases.
- 5y ago
- Barrin92 5y ago>Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970. You sure about that? https://twitter.com/hatr/status/1361756449802768387?s=20 https://twitter.com/hatr/status/1361756449802768387?s=20 >Waymo runs self driving cars today in very specific locations Ernst Dickmann had autonomous cars on the road in very specific locations in the 1980s https://youtu.be/_HbVWm7wdmE https://youtu.be/_HbVWm7wdmE
- dtech 5y agoI don't see how this is relevant. Computers in the 1970 had no situational awareness about people interviewing for jobs. So yes, that software might be crap, it still has infinitely more awareness.
- Barrin92 5y agowhat even is "infinitely more awareness?" is that an actual metric? Computers today have exactly as much awareness as they had in the 1970s, situational or otherwise, which is none. The algorithm in question does not know what a bookshelf is, does not know what a job interview is and it does not know how the two relate. It correlates a bunch of pixels and creates the illusion of having awareness, but this is an anthropomorphization and nothing more.
- croes 5y agoSo you are saying Computer 1970: 0 situational awareness Computer nowadays: 0 * infinity = undefined situational awareness. Pretty useless.
- Workaccount2 5y agoI remember in 2015 when we were decades away from a computer topping a Go champion...
- api 5y ago"After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, the space program is not closer to light speed travel than it was in the 1970s."