Hacker News Reader

mythbuster2001on Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

Driverless trains are not a problem to begin with. If you have a train and it carries hundreds of people [or trainload of cargo], it is economically irrelevant whether it has a human operator or not. So it is safer to have a human there just in case.

mythbuster2001on A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

I'm not sure anything that came out from OpenAI so far, justifies that sort of compensation... Maybe they have some aces up their sleeves...

mythbuster2001on Latest California disengagement data – Autonomous Vehicles are still far away

These numbers are actually much worse than one would think based on the PR.

mythbuster2001on The best laptop ever made

Wait till your Macbook dies and you try to pull some data out of the soldered on SSD. I find dongles annoying, lack of magsafe irritating but the soldered on SSD is what really puts me off.

mythbuster2001on How to measure performance in machine learning

This is a great example on how one can get fooled by optimizing the wrong measure. This should be introductory material to machine learning, before any algorithm gets introduced.

mythbuster2001on Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

This is not rain. This is a drizzle on a very well maintained, center divided freeway, where the radar and ultrasonic sensor has a very nice reference (divider). Also with cars tracked in front. Example of (non-autonomous) driving in a real rain here for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3xKT98a3og

mythbuster2001on AI can predict heart attacks more accurately than doctors

You are dogmatically defending Turing test which I think is the primary source of this confusion. Turing test says: if it fools humans into thinking its intelligent it is intelligent. That is fair. But once some other humans understand the inner workings of some simple "AI" mechanism it no longer fools humans, since they now know what adversarial questions to ask to uncover it. Therefore it consequently fails the Turing test and we have the AI effect. This test is just a bad idea and it impairs research (for a number of reasons stated in the post which you prematurely dismiss).

The coffee criterion for AGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...) is much better, since it requires ability to creatively interact with unpredictable reality as a test for intelligence. It avoids all the philosophical bullshit and all the smoke and mirrors, since you cannot fool physics. Somehow the so called "AI researchers" avoid robotics like fire, sine there stuff actually needs to work (not just statistically) and outrageous BS claims cannot be made.

And yes, ultimately the human brain may be smoke and mirrors. But frankly, quite sophisticated smoke and mirrors, not anywhere close to the crap that is being put forward right now.