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You're putting a lot of faith in the ability to solve a very difficult problem. Computer vision has made huge strides in recent years, but it's still far behind
by teraflop 11y ago
You're putting a lot of faith in the ability to solve a very difficult problem. Computer vision has made huge strides in recent years, but it's still far behind the capabilities of the human visual cortex. It's not just a matter of building a simple model and training it until it achieves arbitrarily high accuracy. ML encompasses a powerful set of tools, but it's not a magic black box that eats data and spits out AI.
We don't yet know how the human brain processes images at a detailed level, and it's too complex of a system to optimize by brute-force. The best ML image processing systems still rely on a lot of pre-encoded assumptions, and require huge amounts of training data/computational resources, and don't perform as well as humans even on simple tasks.
For now, autonomous vehicles "cheat" a lot by using sensor technologies like lidar and radar -- techniques that produce spatial data that can be interpreted more easily than raw imagery. That adds a lot to the hardware costs, but it's currently the only way we can make them perform acceptably well in real-world scenarios. And conditions that interfere with those technologies more severely, like fog or snow, are still crippling.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoActually there's no reason to suppose that computer vision hasn't already exceeded the human capacity. After all, it has lidar and radar. Cheating or not, it has a very good result.
- teraflop 11y agoAgreed -- don't knock it if it works! However, those kinds of sensors don't really fall into what's normally considered "computer vision". Mind you, I'm extremely optimistic about the potential successes of autonomous cars in the near- to mid-future (the next 5 to 25 years, say). But I don't want people to get the wrong impression about where the state of the art is today. And in particular, I want to push back against the idea that machine learning is a solved problem, and that autonomous cars can teach themselves to drive as well as a human if we only give them enough miles of practice.