Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

This has been hanging out there for a while it's just that it never got much mainstream press. I wonder what it is specifically about the concept of "AI" that makes it so prone to the magical thinking that drives these boom-bust cycles.

"I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students"

"Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions is immensely complicated. The software requirements are extremely daunting. Nobody even has the ability to verify and validate the software. I estimate that the challenge of fully automated cars is 10 orders of magnitude more complicated than [fully automated] commercial aviation."

- June 2015, Steve Shladover, transportation researcher at the University of California, Berkeley

https://www.automobilemag.com/news/the-hurdles-facing-autono...

"While I enthusiastically support the research, development, and testing of self-driving cars, as human limitations and the propensity for distraction are real threats on the road, I am decidedly less optimistic about what I perceive to be a rush to field systems that are absolutely not ready for widespread deployment, and certainly not ready for humans to be completely taken out of the driver’s seat."

- March 2016, Mary Cummings, director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/c85cb4ef...

"With autonomous cars, you see these videos from Google and Uber showing a car driving around, but people have not taken it past 80 percent. It's one of those problems where it's easy to get to the first 80 percent, but it's incredibly difficult to solve the last 20 percent. If you have a good GPS, nicely marked roads like in California, and nice weather without snow or rain, it's actually not that hard. But guess what? To solve the real problem, for you or me to buy a car that can drive autonomously from point A to point B—it's not even close. There are fundamental problems that need to be solved."

- September 2016, Herman Herman, director of the Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7y49y/robotics-l...

Right now we have fully autonomous vehicles operating within a roughly 100 square mile geo-fenced area of Chandler Arizona. They are overseen by remote operates who intervene when the vehicles get hung up. The vehicles stop and start at predetermined pick up points. But within those constraints, they work.

Waymo has been developing the technology for 9 years, and have accumulated nearly 8 million real world test miles in that time.For the last 18 months (or so) they have focused their testing in the Chandler area, but are not yet ready for a commercial launch.

For every new area they head into they need to solve specific problems at specific intersections. The vehicles are not yet validated for a full range of weather conditions. There is a huge amount of preliminary work that goes into preparing an area for commercial operations.

Developing an autonomous vehicle that can go anywhere as well as a human might just be 10 orders of magnitude than for commercial aviation, but what Waymo has is enough to disrupt.

'It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer,'' Piet Hut, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, told the NYT in 1997. ''If a reasonably intelligent person learned to play Go, in a few months he could beat all existing computer programs. You don't have to be a Kasparov.''

If you care to, you can dig up plenty of examples of people underestimating, overestimating, or correctly estimating the future capabilities of AI. Just because some guy in New Jersey underestimated it once doesn't mean we should accept AI hype uncritically, especially since much of that hype is driven by moneyed interests.

People are just bad at estimating in general. They tend to assume things will go in a straight line. You can see this most often when the curve is exponential, but asymptotic curves will throw people off too.

"With a further small percentage increase in cost we could reach the level of the baby Newton and better. We could then educate it and teach it its own construction and ask it to design a far more economical and larger machine. At this stage there would unquestionably be an explosive development in science, and it would be possible to let the machines tackle all the most difficult problems of science… For what it is worth, my guess of when all this will come to pass is 1978, and the cost of $10(8.7 ± 1.0)."

- Irving Good

"Within a generation, I am convinced, few compartments of intellect will remain outside the machine’s realm - the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will be substantially solved"

- Marvin Minsky, 1967

You don't have to solve the entirety of the problem for a solution to be useful.

The autonomous cars only drive when it's 80 degrees out, sunny and on predetermined paths? Still welcomed.

Why not just lay out a network of rail lines then?

The technology actually seems perfect for some kind of hybrid between road and rail, if we could build a city from scratch you could make something better than either, with train-like capacity alongside road-like routing.

Although I suppose the difficulty limits the market enough to make investment in such a scheme uncompetitive. Perhaps this is what Musk is hoping to get around that with his tunneling idea.

I'd vote for the other way around. Combine the flexibility of the car with the freedom of riding a train.

Let people drive manually to predetermined locations, let's name them a "station". Where the "AI" takes over and lines up cars on predetermined routes, let's name them "tracks". The AI will control the car on the "track" up until the nearest "station" to the destination. From there the driver will manually continue to her destination.

That is a practical approach until the AI gets better to get you from point A to point B.

Technology solutions seem to be easier than political ones.

Have you recently checked the cost of laying out rail lines in cities?

It's not that they would not be welcomed, but they might not quite deserve the billions being pumped into them at the moment...

I'd argue that it's because (true/hard) AI represents, in many ways, the "final frontier" of scientific research. Not in a literal sense -- they'll always be something else to study. But the notion of creating a thinking machine is, in many ways, the ultimate goal of studying nature and the world around us: to allow us to understand the processes and phenomenon at work well-enough to be able to capture/manipulate/recreate them at will.

This isn't new though -- "thinking machines" have captivated audiences for millenia. See the Antikythera mechanism [1], the Turk [2], and so on. The ability to replicate the capabilities of our own brains is intoxicating -- it finally signals that we, homo sapiens, understand our own minds well-enough to recreate their abilities at will.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

>the "final frontier" of scientific research. Not in a literal sense

Real AI would literally be the final frontier, because at that point, all the scientists could quit their jobs. The AI could replace them.

But real AI is a lot different than what everyone is selling as AI these days, which is essentially a hyper-glorified generalization of linear regression.

I think it is because AI, like intelligence, is undefined in a concrete sense. When someone creates a new algorithm that solves a problem of identification or logic we call it AI. So when people say a thing will be better with better AI you could say it would be better with more effective problem solving. What thing in life couldn’t be made better with more effective problem solving..?

I'm glad to read these because I've been feeling like and been treated like I'm on crazy pills for thinking we aren't even remotely close to autonomous vehicles.

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