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It's awe-inspiring how much more quickly a human brain can learn versus a computer. These companies have expended tens of thousands of engineer-hours of some on

by jakear 5y ago

It's awe-inspiring how much more quickly a human brain can learn versus a computer. These companies have expended tens of thousands of engineer-hours of some one the best minds in the industry to build models derived from tens of thousands of hours of training data, and still I'd place money on a novice human driver with just ~100 hours of experience besting any AI in the majority of "strange" driving circumstances. Of course, if that human brain is tired, stressed, and checking their phone, it's a whole different story :)

Jensson 5y ago
The driving part is usually normal algorithm code and not machine learning though. Machine learning is for object detection, what the software does with that knowledge is regular programming.
- dundarious 5y ago
  Very much so. The tens of thousands of hours of training is like the learning babies do while looking at jangling keys. Then the driving part is more static -- I'm not sure that it's entirely regular programming, there may be some training of models there. But my understanding is it's certainly not learning/training _while_ driving, and _almost_ certainly it's not even learning to drive. It's just doing more learning for object detection and tracking, like a baby watching the world from a pram. So I feel like no matter how many autonomous hours these cars accumulate on the road, they have effectively 0 hours of "learning to drive".
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > I'm not sure that it's entirely regular programming, there may be some training of models there I doubt it, not anything serious at least. Machine learning isn't at the level where it can be used to navigate environments better than human coded algorithms can. Maybe if you had a datacenter worth of computing power to do it, like AlphaStar, but you don't have that in a car. And even if you had that I still doubt it, Alphastar had a perfect representation of the game and could simulate the effects of moves perfectly.
    - dundarious 5y ago
      Agreed, I was trying to suggest that if it's not 100% static code, it's something like 1% models, 99% static code.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    I think the only (but very major) difference is that is that animals and humans learn general knowledge. Someone with 100 hours of driving also has 16+ years of additional general learning. A driving AI has no general knowledge. It doesn’t actually understand what it is looking at. It’s not possible to make up reasonable responses consistently when you don’t know what you are looking at most of the time, machine or human. Have you ever tried to solve a technical problem before you read the documentation covering the basic concepts? You’re basically throwing shit at the wall until something sticks.
- njoubert 5y ago
  That's not quite right. There are learned models inside the planning systems of most of the sophisticated self-driving car companies. Here's a public video that gives a few high-level examples: https://vimeo.com/618478174 https://vimeo.com/618478174 Full disclosure, I work for Aurora in the Planning group.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    How do you know those models are safe? I know Google said they didn't use machine learning for the driving part. Edit: To clarify, I wonder how you do this part: > make safe, predictable decisions on the road. ML models doesn't make predictable outputs. So you always need a system that can handle the ML model going haywire, since you have no way to prove that it wont.
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      This is probably a miscommunication issue. Waymo absolutely uses machine learning in the perception and prediction layers of the stack. Underneath that are a few layers of trajectory planning and controls code that don't necessarily need ML. As for stack accuracy and predictability, they're active areas of research for everyone, and part of the secret sauce. There's lots of little mitigations scattered throughout everyone's stacks for various particular issues, but no silver bullet.
ed 5y ago
> novice human driver with just ~100 hours of experience So a 100 hour old infant?
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  I occasionally drive in the NYC metro area, and I'm pretty sure a 100 hour old infant could drive better than some of the folks I'm sharing the road with.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Many animals can walk and navigate environments better at 100 hours old than todays self driving cars can. Here is a 50 hour old horse, imagine if our self driving cars had this level of environmental awareness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJEMh-_vaME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJEMh-_vaME
  - 999900000999 5y ago
    This sounds like a start of a dystopian novel, where animal brains are being shoved into various robots. And that a researcher who's trying to stop it, ultimately fails and he's also turned into a robot.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      I wonder what comes first, engineered biological brains that we can put in things like cars or that machine learning has progressed to the point we no longer need biological brains. Biological brains are super cheap and efficient though. The brain of a fly can still do object recognition and navigate environments for basically free, weighs less than a milligram including cameras, and the factory to produce those brains is just putting a cell in a wet environment and it builds itself, the brain of an ant can build complex structures etc. It is possible metal brains will never beat those.
    - lazide 5y ago
      If only you didn’t have to pay them so much it could happen? (Only a little /s)
willhinsa 5y ago
Well, to be fair, the human driver in comparison had to have a decade or two of learning before they could drive well.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  They did? I sure didn't. Unless you count things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_Run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_Run or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_Position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_Position or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Hunter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Hunter
  - robotresearcher 5y ago
    I had about 16 years of walking and 14 years of cycling around gradually increasingly complex environments before I drove a car. The car controls are not the challenge. It’s understanding what everyone else is doing and how to handle it safely while making progress and not surprising other people that is tough. And those skills are partially - only partially - transferable from your pre-car experience.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      > I had about 16 years of walking and 14 years of cycling around gradually increasingly complex environments before I drove a car. A lot of that has to do with humans not being born with fully developed brains. Animals can walk and navigate environments as soon as they are born, so there is no reason to believe that humans actually learns these things rather than those systems slowly maturing as we grow up. The other part is that our pre-trained movement system is made for human bodies, not cars. So learning to drive a car is learning to use another mode of moving yourself. Also you have to learn traffic rules. But the other things like understanding environments etc you get for free for being a human, every single large animal can do the same. They wont learn the traffic laws or how to drive the car, but they know how to navigate environments without hitting things.
      - 5y ago
judge2020 5y ago
When/if it happens, though, that we get actual level 4 / 5 asynchronous, fast locomotion. That process has to start somewhere.
mclightning 5y ago
>> It's awe-inspiring how much more quickly a human brain can learn versus a computer. Do you think we live in StarTrek future already? Human brain is the most complex thing in the entire universe, as far as we know so far. You compare it to a what, a computer?

by jakear 5y ago

Jensson 5y ago

The driving part is usually normal algorithm code and not machine learning though. Machine learning is for object detection, what the software does with that knowledge is regular programming.

dundarious 5y ago
Very much so. The tens of thousands of hours of training is like the learning babies do while looking at jangling keys. Then the driving part is more static -- I'm not sure that it's entirely regular programming, there may be some training of models there. But my understanding is it's certainly not learning/training _while_ driving, and _almost_ certainly it's not even learning to drive. It's just doing more learning for object detection and tracking, like a baby watching the world from a pram. So I feel like no matter how many autonomous hours these cars accumulate on the road, they have effectively 0 hours of "learning to drive".
- Jensson 5y ago
  > I'm not sure that it's entirely regular programming, there may be some training of models there I doubt it, not anything serious at least. Machine learning isn't at the level where it can be used to navigate environments better than human coded algorithms can. Maybe if you had a datacenter worth of computing power to do it, like AlphaStar, but you don't have that in a car. And even if you had that I still doubt it, Alphastar had a perfect representation of the game and could simulate the effects of moves perfectly.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    Agreed, I was trying to suggest that if it's not 100% static code, it's something like 1% models, 99% static code.
- thrashh 5y ago
  I think the only (but very major) difference is that is that animals and humans learn general knowledge. Someone with 100 hours of driving also has 16+ years of additional general learning. A driving AI has no general knowledge. It doesn’t actually understand what it is looking at. It’s not possible to make up reasonable responses consistently when you don’t know what you are looking at most of the time, machine or human. Have you ever tried to solve a technical problem before you read the documentation covering the basic concepts? You’re basically throwing shit at the wall until something sticks.
njoubert 5y ago
That's not quite right. There are learned models inside the planning systems of most of the sophisticated self-driving car companies. Here's a public video that gives a few high-level examples: https://vimeo.com/618478174 https://vimeo.com/618478174 Full disclosure, I work for Aurora in the Planning group.
- Jensson 5y ago
  How do you know those models are safe? I know Google said they didn't use machine learning for the driving part. Edit: To clarify, I wonder how you do this part: > make safe, predictable decisions on the road. ML models doesn't make predictable outputs. So you always need a system that can handle the ML model going haywire, since you have no way to prove that it wont.
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    This is probably a miscommunication issue. Waymo absolutely uses machine learning in the perception and prediction layers of the stack. Underneath that are a few layers of trajectory planning and controls code that don't necessarily need ML. As for stack accuracy and predictability, they're active areas of research for everyone, and part of the secret sauce. There's lots of little mitigations scattered throughout everyone's stacks for various particular issues, but no silver bullet.

ed 5y ago

> novice human driver with just ~100 hours of experience So a 100 hour old infant?

pavel_lishin 5y ago
I occasionally drive in the NYC metro area, and I'm pretty sure a 100 hour old infant could drive better than some of the folks I'm sharing the road with.
Jensson 5y ago
Many animals can walk and navigate environments better at 100 hours old than todays self driving cars can. Here is a 50 hour old horse, imagine if our self driving cars had this level of environmental awareness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJEMh-_vaME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJEMh-_vaME
- 999900000999 5y ago
  This sounds like a start of a dystopian novel, where animal brains are being shoved into various robots. And that a researcher who's trying to stop it, ultimately fails and he's also turned into a robot.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    I wonder what comes first, engineered biological brains that we can put in things like cars or that machine learning has progressed to the point we no longer need biological brains. Biological brains are super cheap and efficient though. The brain of a fly can still do object recognition and navigate environments for basically free, weighs less than a milligram including cameras, and the factory to produce those brains is just putting a cell in a wet environment and it builds itself, the brain of an ant can build complex structures etc. It is possible metal brains will never beat those.
  - lazide 5y ago
    If only you didn’t have to pay them so much it could happen? (Only a little /s)

willhinsa 5y ago

Well, to be fair, the human driver in comparison had to have a decade or two of learning before they could drive well.

perl4ever 5y ago
They did? I sure didn't. Unless you count things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_Run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_Run or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_Position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_Position or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Hunter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Hunter
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  I had about 16 years of walking and 14 years of cycling around gradually increasingly complex environments before I drove a car. The car controls are not the challenge. It’s understanding what everyone else is doing and how to handle it safely while making progress and not surprising other people that is tough. And those skills are partially - only partially - transferable from your pre-car experience.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > I had about 16 years of walking and 14 years of cycling around gradually increasingly complex environments before I drove a car. A lot of that has to do with humans not being born with fully developed brains. Animals can walk and navigate environments as soon as they are born, so there is no reason to believe that humans actually learns these things rather than those systems slowly maturing as we grow up. The other part is that our pre-trained movement system is made for human bodies, not cars. So learning to drive a car is learning to use another mode of moving yourself. Also you have to learn traffic rules. But the other things like understanding environments etc you get for free for being a human, every single large animal can do the same. They wont learn the traffic laws or how to drive the car, but they know how to navigate environments without hitting things.
    - 5y ago

judge2020 5y ago

When/if it happens, though, that we get actual level 4 / 5 asynchronous, fast locomotion. That process has to start somewhere.

mclightning 5y ago

>> It's awe-inspiring how much more quickly a human brain can learn versus a computer. Do you think we live in StarTrek future already? Human brain is the most complex thing in the entire universe, as far as we know so far. You compare it to a what, a computer?