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"But if we started to take diagnostics that had higher dimensions and resolution, and just trained blackbox AI on that data, it probably stands to reason that..."

...that we would have no way to evaluate the systems' accuracy because no other non-statistical system can understand the input data?

The Oracle at Delphi is always correct. Even when the Oracle is wrong, the Oracle is correct.

"...just fencing off the highways and inventing an autonomous system of vehicles that doesn't have this much tougher constraint...

Kind of expensive to build a second interstate highway system, though.

> we would have no way to evaluate the systems' accuracy because no other non-statistical system can understand the input data

No, we can always evaluate the accuracy based on our current human-understandable images and scans and biopsies.

We can evaluate over time. If the system repeatedly predicts people you will get lung cancer in 10 years based on scans, and in 10 years we finally detect that cancer that says there must be something even if we don't know what. Finding that what then becomes important (along with figuring out how to treat lung cancer 10 years before we can currently detect it)

Of course this is all assuming there is something there. It might be there is nothing to find. I wouldn't be surprised either way.

> instead of just fencing off the highways and inventing an autonomous system of vehicles

As a popular joke likes to say: The best place for AI cars is on special roads. You can then make those cars drive very close togehter, even touching. Oh and you can then move the special road behind buildings instead of the front. Give room for more pedestrian friendly pleasant streets. Then you may as well move the road underground.

You have invented the subway.

We have automated subway where I live, and while they're nice and modern, I understand why people would want the privacy and comfort of a personal car. That's one of the points that isn't mentionned in your joke.

Another is that you could have your car use its AI in the special roads in the city and highways, and the rest of the time drive yourself, where AI is harder to implement. A bit like some hybrid cars where you can do most of the day to day commute on electricity, but for longer road trips you can use gas.

Sort of. I think there's a good argument to be made for part-time self-driving cars with specially-designed highways in places where it makes sense. So you'd drive your car the old-fashioned way from your home on the residential streets until you get to the Automatic Interstate. There, you maneuver into the "pattern" lane and the road and the AI pull you into traffic and drive you to your exit. At that point you're directed out of the pattern and control is given back to you, where you take the side streets to wherever you were going.

It has the advantage that it covers the very common use case where someone says they can't take public transportation because they need mobility at their destination.

I kind of agree, in that I think there's a great argument to ban them from anywhere pedestrians are found.

Pedestrians and police cars, apparently https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/30/business/tesla-crash-poli...

Is there not a space between "fully automated subway" and "automationless road" where practical solutions exist? Case in point, what if we changed the materials composition of road paint? Or, what if cars were designed to better alert other cars of their location and speed?

Are you going to attach these transmitters to every deer and every pedestrian? If not, we're back to 'elevated or buried road so we don't have to worry about animals and people- why not just build a train?' or 'AI which can solve the whole problem on its own' or 'If I recognize something unusual hand off back to a human, hope that they were paying attention and know what to do.'

And that still leaves aside tricky things like construction sites, double parked cars, etc.

Commercial airline autopilot has a lot more straightforward job: at normal operating altitudes there are no animals to worry about, no construction or other unexpected obstacles, and few other aircraft all of which can be essentially guaranteed to be squawking transponder codes of their own, and they still are mandated to have two pilots in them at all times. This is not because airlines like it- look how fast the flight engineer disappeared once flight management and navigation software became sufficient. It is instead because airlines have learned over the decades, from a lot of blood, that sometimes you need to have a pilot ready to intervene RIGHT THIS INSTANT, not 3 minutes from now when you've regained situational awareness after zoning out for a bit- and the AF447 disaster shows that they are right about that. And the only way to make sure you have such focus and alertness over many hours is to have two pilots, so they can trade off the responsibility of maintaining SA.

And that's a much easier problem which has been actively attacked for decades.

Are pedestrians and deer an issue today? I thought it was more specific than this.

Nobody poops in my car, busks, or gropes women. LMK when American governments can and do enforce minimal behavioural and safety standards in public.

Let's call street harassment what it is: an epidemic. According to a survey of subway riders conducted by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in 2007, roughly two-thirds of respondents, mostly women, experienced sexual harassment on the subway; 69% reported feeling sexually threatened

https://www.mic.com/articles/120898/7-simple-ways-to-stop-se...

> instead of just fencing off the highways

Well, if you did that, you probably wouldn't even need AI for the control system. If you know the parameters and have some control over unknowns, you want a deterministic control system. "AI" will hopefully handle the cases where you are in an uncontrolled environment. Current "AI" doesn't seem quite up to the task of self-driving. It will probably get there, but when is anyone's guess.

> you probably wouldn't even need AI for the control system

Wouldn't need it, no, but could use it to analyze traffic patterns and optimize flow for fuel efficiency, travel time, and safety. Those are much more constrained problems for which we have some useful tools.

As with most things, trying to automate everything is really hard because things are rarely built to be easily automated. And sometimes it's very hard to extract the easy to automate part from the whole. Driving is a very good example.

So you're saying, "If we make up new measures that the AI can score well on, AI will score well"?

Sort of, yeah. What I'm mostly saying is, "We don't (yet) take measures that humans can't understand."

What's the point of taking measures that humans can't understand? How can they be evaluated for correctness?

By simultaneously taking measures that humans can understand.

So, they just become proxies, but then we have to figure out how good they are as proxies.

> It's the same problem I have with self-driving cars. We are teaching cars to behave around (and like) humans, instead of just fencing off the highways and inventing an autonomous system of vehicles ... to redesign existing systems around AI, instead of trying to replace the humans ...

Of course, fencing off existing roads to exclude human-driven cars is an economic impossibility, like converting all our electrical systems to use compressed water instead.

Regardless, today's autocars are clearly NOT ready to fly solo in the absence of humans, as the Tesla that crashed into an overturned truck on a clear day a few months ago so clearly demonstrated.

I think the tight feedback loop for multiple scans is a good idea worth exploring, but the larger idea of building alternate systems has a problem that there's no clear path to a viable end-state.

With diagnoses, collating a consistent set of data is not a requirement you can impose because of how fractured the healthcare system is. If you had great AI systems in place maybe they could be convinced to invest in these systems, but you don't and so creating them is quite difficult.

Similarly, in the case of cars having their own highways and roads: how do we do this in a way that people find acceptable? If you prevent current highways from being driven on by normal cars, you cut off the majority of people from their daily commute which is a nonstarter. Making new highways in most places will also be a nonstarter for both cost and space reasons. At best you might hope that decades from now every single car has the means for self-driving in the limited environment and then one day the government turns it on, but that also feels iffy to me.

Building parallel systems incrementally creates harder technical problems but allows you to side step even harder coordination problems.

When AlphaGo went against Lee Sedol, it often made moves in the later stages of the game which were completely inexplicable to almost all game analysts and commentators, it seemed like a bad/stupid move, or at the very minimum, it seemed like a move which was hard to build upon. But it eventually won. I think we should let an AI model do its thing, even if it possibly seems absurd to traditional human understanding. The aim shouldnt be to make them like us(or better than us), it should rather be to make them the best form of themselves( which I hope will eventually be better than us )

Also, presumably xrays are harmful if done too often or too strongly, so being able to replace those with something less harmful (like some kind of 3-D sonogram) but that AI can interpret to the same degree would be a net benefit potentially becoming a home device for people with suseptability.

If you shift the curve you could detect earlier and reduce false positives.

It's not an issue of resolution but of generalizability. Populations and scanners shift over time and the biggest issue in clinical AI is the changing data distribution, such as data acquired at different times at different institution. Medical devices (which AI software is considered) is also more regulated than self-driving cars.

> I think the problem with this is that the AI is being used on metrics and images and tests that have meaning to humans.

Who would submit to a test that nobody knows what it means? What ethics department would let you run that test?

Now, if you want to use metrics already on file that radiologists don't generally consider, that might be interesting.

"just fencing off the highways and inventing an autonomous system of vehicles"

And then they can platoon together to reduce air drag 4x, be electric and be built on a special surface to reduce friction 4x compared to 'normal' road?

I think that's called a train