Hacker News Reader

Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why people think intelligence requires things like a desire for suffrage...

There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals.

Heck, even counting votes would be quite impossible (how much divergence does a copy need before it gets its own vote? What it not all modules/nodes are copied?).

Also, the anti-suffrage women seem to have been erased from history as far as popular discourse goes... guess the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League isn't taught in schools (support amongst women for extending the vote was very lukewarm, becoming a majority only after the law changed).

View on HN

There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals.

Because driving requires the ability to understand what other drivers are doing. It requires a theory of mind, which means understanding human goals.

Moving from point A to point B is the goal of humans while they drive. You don't need "human like" understanding of human goals. You do need to account for the stupidity of people though.

Not true, at least for any skilled driver. N=1, & my prior racing training & experience is an advantageous influence, but I am constantly assessing the intent, attitude, skills, etc. of other drivers to adjust my actions.

Of course it is trivially true that we all intend to go from point A to B. But that is almost irrelevant. It is the million micro-decisions on the trip that count.

Without seeing the human, I assess in seconds whether the other driver is unusually high or low-skills, focused or distracted or impaired, polite or rude... and this constant assessment, with human understanding, of (others') human goals and attitudes is a key element of driving skills, and yes this is basically all covered in your exception of needing to account for stupidity of people. That exception is just bigger than you think.

Human drivers communicate with each other through subtle cues, body language, etc. Moreover, pedestrians, children playing in the street, pets running onto the road chasing a ball, construction sites, parades, protests, are all things involving intelligence and theory of mind that you can't reduce to "the goal is to point A to point B."

We can try to reduce these things. Most things can be reduced to "obstacles". If obstacles are behaving the way we predict, then they are logical, otherwise they are flagged as illogical. When i engage in "subtle cues" or "body language" while on traffic i never trust it. If someone starts to drive illogically i never try to predict what they will do next, i just flag them as illogical and prepare for the worst.

There is a way to solve all these issues: keep humans (and other animals) away. This is how it's done with railroads. Unfortunately, there's not a whole of advantage in eliminating the engineer of a train since the ratio of engineers to passengers is so small to begin with.

I think instead of flirting with this absurd fantasy of self-driving cars we should be doing more to invest in railroads and other forms of mass transit so that people don't need to drive at all. Europe and Asia are far ahead of North America in this regard.

Mass transit doesn't get you exactly where you need to go. In areas with lower population density, it's especially unprofitable and difficult to implement -- and even if communities can afford it, it will deliver people even FARTHER from where they need to go.

I'm a transit advocate, but there are some fundamental issues that need to be resolved first, especially in North America.

Even in Europe, there are a lot of places you can't get to or get to easily without a car. I've done long distance walks in England, for example, and once you get beyond cities and larger towns, it's often the case that there may be a once or twice a day bus.

You can understand something/someone without agreeing with them and having the same goals.

> It requires a theory of mind, which means understanding human goals.

Like chess?

Chess doesn't require understanding human goals if you're an AI, just running through the space of winning moves that your training encountered. An AI doesn't think "ah, rook to E4, knowing Kasparov, he will then castle and I can do X". It'll just go "lol I encountered 3 486 864 games with this particular board pattern and 49 652 lead to a victory lemme pick one for the lulz".

Chess is really just about searching through as much of the space as possible, and you can take a few seconds. And believe me, there's a whole lot more stupid behaviours you can encounter on the road while you have to react in less than a second.

> It'll just go "lol I encountered 3 486 864 games with this particular board pattern and 49 652 lead to a victory lemme pick one for the lulz".

That isn't really an accurate description of how the modern DL bots work. They don't need to reference any database of past games while they play.

Chess is a perfect information game. Both opponents can see the entire board at all times. Reality, nor even driving, is not anywhere close to that. Weather, time of day, climate, seasonality, and other drivers throw constant and voluminous amounts of unpredictability into the mix.

> Reality, nor even driving, is not anywhere close to that.

This reminds me of the kinds of intuitions people had about Chess and Go. In retrospect they seem silly, but it made plenty of sense to them at the time. The fact was that there was a solution that machines could use that humans couldn't use. Naturally, a solution that humans couldn't use was hard for them to anticipate being effective.

Chess AIs don't need to develop an understanding of the goal, they're hard-wired with the rules of the game and its goal-states.

As an experiment, try making a chess AI without explicitly giving it the rules of the game and see how it performs.

I think that's already been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero

Almost, but not quite, exactly unlike chess.

So not like chess, but like how chess was supposed to be?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com