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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970.

You sure about that?

https://twitter.com/hatr/status/1361756449802768387?s=20

>Waymo runs self driving cars today in very specific locations

Ernst Dickmann had autonomous cars on the road in very specific locations in the 1980s

https://youtu.be/_HbVWm7wdmE

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How much would you bet that human interviewers' opinions of a candidate after a video interview wouldn't be affected if they were visibly in a room full of books? Or if they wore glasses, or had a painting hanging on the wall, or the various other things the researchers found made a difference to the AI's assessment?

To be clear, I am super-skeptical about the ability of AI systems to do a good job of judging an interviewee's personality from a short video clip. But (1) this seems obviously to be a really hard problem, and one that couldn't even have been attempted in 1970, and (2) I am also pretty skeptical about the ability of human interviewers to do it.

> "But (1) this seems obviously to be a really hard problem, and one that couldn't even have been attempted in 1970"

Apollo 11 landed on the moon July 20th 1969. You think that didn't take a degree of "AI" and "ML"? Or maybe we just had a different name for these things back then...

It's been 52 years since then.

We're simply focusing on the wrong problems.

I think that's just a matter of 1. resources and 2. risk tolerance.

1960s USA had a less superficial political culture, so was more willing to tolerate PR-sensitive risks in pursuing major technological achievements, and it could allocate a much larger proportion of GDP to the Apollo program, as government directed social welfare spending consumed a far smaller share of GDP: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-...

> You sure about that?

Single dumb human posts singular dumb ai example to show that all ai are dumb and fails to recognize the irony.

Its easy to point at the bookshelf example and say "Haha AI is stupid", but its actually quite impressive. One could easily argue that most human interviewers have similar bias, and that it can detect such complex signals (books, glasses etc) IS impressive.

The problem is this case is the data and/or wrong objectives, but the "AI" here has a lot of awareness, just on the "wrong" signals.

That project has way to little coverage. It is like the 70s automatic hamburger joint.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE

I recall some Ford(?) project which guided the cars by rail that was quite old.

I don't see how this is relevant. Computers in the 1970 had no situational awareness about people interviewing for jobs. So yes, that software might be crap, it still has infinitely more awareness.

what even is "infinitely more awareness?" is that an actual metric? Computers today have exactly as much awareness as they had in the 1970s, situational or otherwise, which is none. The algorithm in question does not know what a bookshelf is, does not know what a job interview is and it does not know how the two relate. It correlates a bunch of pixels and creates the illusion of having awareness, but this is an anthropomorphization and nothing more.

How do you know it is nothing more? Why wouldn't awareness emerge from a large amount of correlation?

How would we know if it had "actual awareness" and not "the illusion of awareness"

So you are saying

Computer 1970: 0 situational awareness

Computer nowadays: 0 * infinity = undefined situational awareness.

Pretty useless.

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