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Comment by hellllllllooo | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't the Turning test been discredited as a test of general AI?

Overall from reading the abstract it seems like a pretty obvious conclusion. Same applies to robotics where the only successful cases are very constrained.

It has recently occured to me to ask why we have decided to try solve autonomous driving before solving any other seemingly easier robotics problems. Other than robo-vacuums, which aren't particularly complex, we have jumped straight to trying to solve one of the hardest unconstrained robotics and AI challenges in automotive environments.

edit: Getting downvoted, if you disagree could you reply with why?

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Self driving r&d is rewarded in stock valuations. First, because you can create great looking demos and hide the real difficulties.

Second, because you can say you will be selling trips, and have network effects,which seems to be a much more profitable proposition than selling robots.

Can you build a similar story for domestic robots ? It would be much harder. And without that, you can't invest long term.

So robotics is advancing incrementally.

>Hasn't the Turning test been discredited as a test of general AI?

I'm not sure discredited so much as 1.) Turing didn't introduce the test as an explicit test of intelligence and 2.) there have always been criticisms of trying to use the test for this purpose.

Wikipedia has a pretty good run-down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Weaknesses

>It has recently occured to me to ask why we have decided to try solve autonomous driving before solving any other seemingly easier robotics problems. Other than robo-vacuums, which aren't particularly complex, we have jumped straight to trying to solve one of the hardest unconstrained robotics and AI challenges in automotive environments.

I'd say it's because other problems are actually difficult in hidden ways or lack much of a value proposition given existing mechanical aids. Cars are in some ways simple because they have plenty of space for electronics and have an easy to automate set of controls. That's not even getting into industrial robotics which is very popular.

Industrial robotics are very well constrained and the environment can be adapted to them which is why they're successful. Was thinking more about consumer robotics of which robo vacuum is the only real autonomous product right now.

IMO the answer is that it's very hard to build reliable robots + AI even in simple environments and AVs are still very dependant on the driver. The size of the potential market if it pays off is huge but removing the driver completely is going to take a long time.

Automobiles are some of the most constrained consumer problems in my opinion. There's strong laws on how cars can operate and the environments they operate in. Cars operate in constrained and relatively simple ways. Most other consumer problems are optimized around a human body's abilities which are very complex.

It's still incredibly complex. Reliably handling an area like downtown SF requires a robot to detect, understand and predict a lot of diverse human behavior. All the edge cases lead me to think there will be a supervisory driver in the car for a long time unless we constrain the environment further.

>> It has recently occured to me to ask why we have decided to try solve autonomous driving before solving any other seemingly easier robotics problems.

As far as I can tell, a few years ago, Google decided it was a good idea and then everyone else followed suit, because it's Google so they must be on to something.

Mind, there was earlier work on self-driving cars that was just as impressive as modern efforts, but you rarely hear about it.

Here; You-Again Schmidhuber got the works:

http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/robotcars.html

Apart from the obvious value of solving the problem, part of the point of taking moonshots is that you invent a whole lot of valuable stuff along the way, even if you fail.

And in this case I mean moonshots literally, because NASA was one.

Sure. I get the value proposition. Just seems strange that we don't have more examples of constrained autonomous robotics products beyond factory/warehouses and vacumns. IMO the answer is that it's very hard to build reliable robots + AI even in simple environments and AVs are still very dependant on the driver.

There are lots of other examples, depending on what you consider to be autonomous robotics - grass mowers, delivery drones, autonomous trains, elevators, vending machines.

Do you have an application in mind which is easier than autonomous cars but where there is no current product?

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