Ask HN: Do you think autonomous vehicles = AGI (Artifical General Intelligence)? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think autonomous vehicles = AGI (Artifical General Intelligence)?

3 pointsair72 comments

The hype around the coming of the autonomous car is very strong and it feels like it's just around the corner. Millions of miles driven already with few disengagements etc.

Yet when I think about it while driving I keep noticing situations that seem to me to require intelligence to solve. By intelligence I mean a deep understanding of human behavior and social norms. Something far beyond the capabilities of any AI system I know. This happens often.

One example: If a human standing by the road hold his hand to you with the "stop" gesture, you would stop. But only if you judge that person to have "authority": If they looks stern, have a uniform, do not smile, etc. Otherwise, you would ignore them (e.g a teenage prank, a drunk, a shady character etc). Erring in both directions could have dire consequences. Of course we can theoretically build an AI to measure "authority" and "gestures" but even if we could do that well enough, that's just one out of many.

So to me it seems that real AVs (level 4+) would have to require AGI but if/when we have that, the world would be so so different, that AVs would be the least of our concerns.

It seems though, that I hold the minority opinion, at least among my social circle. I'd be happy to hear what the HN crowd thinks?

One thing you can bet on is that virtually every carmaker is over-hyping their technology. Expect "Level 5" tech to be more like Level 4, "Level 4" to be more like Level 3, and so on.

I don't even know how they can even claim Level 5 (looking at you Nvidia) when their systems don't involve real-time training, but just do inferencing. I'm talking machine learning training not "it's gathering data as it drives training". You know what that means - it means the cars's autonomous systems need to have been trained for the roads on which they are driving or at least for those conditions ahead of time, somewhere in the cloud.

But Level 5 is supposed to work on ANY ROAD ANY TIME. I doubt they have already trained their systems for ANY ROAD ANY TIME and anywhere in the world. That seems very unlikely to me. In other words, Nvidia, and Tesla, and whoever else is promising Level 5 autonomy is lying to you.

And because of this stupidity and greed, the government will probably have to come up with Level 6 and Level 7 in the future, to designate to Level 7 what Level 5 should have been from the beginning. Think about how the US carriers started abusing the "4G" marketing in the early years. I very much expect the same to happen with self-driving cars, all for the sake of misleading marketing.

I also believe none of these players take software security that seriously. Some will at least implement the best practices, but won't go beyond that, most probably won't even do that (Google how stupid carmakers are being about remotely unlocking their doors over the internet for instance...). Unfortunately, this won't be noticed until maybe 7-10 years after millions of these cars are deployed. And then the hacks will start coming (including terrorist attacks using them).

No.

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