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Doesn't the analogy fail given autonomous vehicles are eventually possible and pursued and unicorns not?
by walkhour 5y ago
Doesn't the analogy fail given autonomous vehicles are eventually possible and pursued and unicorns not?
- amcoastal 5y ago
- gkop 5y agoThat’s part of the point: Whether or not they are eventually possible is an open question. The standard argument for agnosticism as to the possibility is “The problem reduces to artificial general intelligence, the possibility of which is an open question.”
- walkhour 5y agoIs whether unicorns are possible an open question? Even if it is, does anyone care about it? Are any companies actively trying to create unicorns?
- mysterydip 5y agoThey would certainly have a market for my 6yo daughter's demographic.
- dmm 5y ago> Whether or not they are eventually possible is an open question. They're probably not possible with the road system we have but we redesigned our road system to accommodate cars(arguably with terrible results for non-cars) and we could probably redesign it again for autonomous cars. For example by requiring pedestrians and cyclists to wear radio transponders.
- rmbyrro 5y agoI never thought driving a vehicle is that general of an activity to require AGI. Which parts of driving would require AGI?
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago> Which parts of driving would require AGI? Being able to read the intent of other cars and preemptively act if necessary. For instance, being able to predict that the harried mom on her phone toting 3 screaming kids in her beat up minivan is likely to change lanes without looking (I passed her preemptively), or that the car with out-of-state plates is likely to miss a confusingly signed exit and try and cut over at the last minute without looking (I slowed down preemptively, to let the car abruptly veer across three lanes of traffic ahead of me). Both of these examples require an understanding of the world that goes far beyond mere driving skills.
- yazaddaruvala 5y agoOr, the AV can calculate the worst from every car and go a little slower i.e. safer. Leave more room between the car in front and move out of the way for cars too close behind. An average 20 min ride increased by 10% would be 22 mins. I’d gladly trade an extra few mins in the car to 1. Be safer. 2. Get back 20 mins to check the news or play chess or worst case work. Self driving cars aren’t just going to be a reality, in PHX they kinda are a reality. It doesn’t seem far fetched to think 5 years (high estimate - 10 years) from now Waymo will be scaled to the top 25 cities in the US.
- rmbyrro 5y agoThese are indeed examples that are far ahead of the tech we have today, but I'd bet a single-digit percentage of drivers actually perform these tasks, and most do it only occasionally. There are areas where AI drivers win over human drivers. Maybe it's already net positive? I have the opinion we don't need AI to be perfect, just on par or better than humans from an aggregate perspective.
- simion314 5y ago>Doesn't the analogy fail given autonomous vehicles are eventually possible Only if there is a mathematical proof that eventually it will happen, someone might proof the reverse that current type of tech will never be good enough for general purpose driving and will work only in some specific conditions.
- ben_w 5y agoThe only way it’s impossible in principle is if human intelligence (and a lot of non human animal intelligence) is due to some potent non-physical substance of thought which can never be made by any work of artifice on the physical plane, AKA a soul. Absent souls, human drivers are existence proof that minds made of matter can drive cars. That doesn’t stop being true even if the current preferred architecture is all wrong, as we can and do change those with ease.
- simion314 5y ago>The only way it’s impossible in principle is if human intelligence (and a lot of non human animal intelligence) is due to some potent non-physical substance of thought which can never be made by any work of artifice on the physical plane, AKA a soul. So I was thinking "eventually" as somewhat in next 100 years, otherwise even if you need a soul you could say shit like "eventually we will evolve to the next plane and become gods and we could create brains". Could it be impossible that we hit a tech limit for AI? I mean there is no sure what that we will invent something better then digital, silicon based computers. I am not that pessimist though, but is possible we get smart and realize that we could just put tracks and have self driving little trains on them to travel around: 100% safe (we could have actual scientist/engineers code the software for them) and much more green.
- ben_w 5y agoI think you may be underestimating the rate of progress — 100 years ago, transistors were hypothetical, now we have made more of them than there are stars in our past light cone, and they are smaller and faster than synapses to the degree to which wolves are smaller than hills and move further per day than continental drift. IMO we will probably hit the single-atom limit in consumer devices this decade, though researchers are already suggesting multiple q-bits in a single atom so perhaps we won’t even stop when we get 1Å process chips. The main limiting factor right now is that we don’t really understand the structure of our intelligence. If you will permit an analogy: perceptrons and convolution kernels are like bricks, while current brain scans (MRI, EEG, etc.) are like nighttime satellite photos of city lights — we’ve got a gap in the middle that would tell us we need steel reinforced concrete to make skyscrapers and why want to build them in the first place.
- paulcole 5y ago> given autonomous vehicles are eventually possible I think of this as an unproven assumption, not a given.
- walkhour 5y agoAgreed! My point is not so much as whether it's possible, it's as whether the analogy holds, which I think it doesn't, since no companies are trying to create unicorns.
- jacobr1 5y agoI don't get why people think this is theoretical. We have autonomous vehicles driving on the road _today_. They've logged millions of miles. The question is one of fidelity. Can they drive "safe enough?" Can they drive in a blizzard? These are important questions and are needed to answer a question like, are autonomous vehicles "sufficiently advanced" enough to fully replace human drivers in most scenarios? But even if they never advanced beyond what we have today, they still would have use cases that demand clear regulation.
- paulcole 5y agoI think that the autonomous vehicles on the road today are the equivalent of duct taping a traffic cone to a horse’s forehead and saying, “See, I told you unicorns aren’t theoretical.”
- natch 5y agoIt may be an assumption, but I think of it as akin to the assumption that Wilbur and Orville Wright had that heavier than air flying craft could become practical. Unproven, but one would be a fool to bet money against it happening on the OP’s “eventually” timeline.
- paulcole 5y ago> but one would be a fool to bet money against it happening on the OP’s “eventually” timeline. Well, I mean, duh. You’d be a fool to bet against seeing a unicorn on an “eventually” timeline. Try to collect and I say it’s not eventually yet.
- dahfizz 5y agoIf genetically engineering a unicorn was given the level of resources that self driving has, then I think we would have unicorns by now.