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Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

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Re: Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

#31
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Car insurance can work exactly like it currently does. The car owner's insurance is liable by default, however if the car itself is in some way at fault (performing out-of-spec), then the insurance company goes after the car company. This can already happen if something like brakes fail or accelerator gets stuck. 2 & 3) Yes there are some edge cases that you can't train for, but same with humans. What do humans do…

Car insurance: I had made a simplified argument, but to itemize, auto insurance may work the same for auto-theft and some liability coverage. But, it definitely cannot work the same for anything remotely related to driver (or in this case self-driving system's) fault. Edge Cases: Humans use their brain and adapt. Self driving systems have no concept of adapting, hence the result is undefined. > over 1.25 million deat…

Thanks for the correction, the 1.25 million number is worldwide, not US https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

Self driving systems however do adapt. Most companies are using neural networks which can be retrained based on their mistakes. Unlike a human, they can also be trained on each and every crash for which sensor data is available.

Re: Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I have ever wanted from phone assistants is to tell me whether a coffee shop was open or not, or what the closing time is. I still can't get this info, nor is this question understood. I still have to stop, launch a browser, navigate to the site, and dig around their website for opening hours, or in the worst case find a phone number and call to ask them.

What phone assistants are you using? I’ve never had this problem.

Siri

Re: Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

#35
Clarke's first law comes to mind. Not an exact fit but pertinent nonetheless:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Re: Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

#36
post #30
post #9

Is this because he doesn't expect to live much longer? He is an overweight 69 year old.

Woz aside, I don't think people realize the increased mortality of being on the upper end of the (literal) scale. Here's a journal article: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... but to summarize BMI vs years lost: BMI 40-45 45-50 50-55 55-60 men -6.5 -10.8 -10.6 -17.0 women -6.9 -9.1 -10.3 -13.1

For my height 1.7 m I would have 10 weigh 115 kg to have a BMI of 40. Bloody hell, I count myself as overweight at the 74 kg I weigh now, BMI 26. Just can't imagine carrying an extra 41 kg!

Doesn't surprise me at all that it would shorten my life. Never mind that but the life one has must be worse as well.

Re: Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

#37
post #4

I agree, not because of technical issues but because we will never be able to get past the 'Trolley Problem'.

The Trolley Problem is only a problem in theory. In real life no one but the victim of a psychopath who has carefully stage managed the problem ever has to confront it.

When one in real life has such a problem one doesn't have time for reflection, adrenalin and social conditioning take over.

People jump in front of trains to rescue other people careless of the harm that might be done to their families and friend should they die in the attempt.

Re: Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

#38
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to have no trouble playing music from Spotify for me. It can even manage it while I yell my song requests from the shower.

The only thing I have ever wanted from phone assistants is to tell me whether a coffee shop was open or not, or what the closing time is. I still can't get this info, nor is this question understood. I still have to stop, launch a browser, navigate to the site, and dig around their website for opening hours, or in the worst case find a phone number and call to ask them.

The one thing that I can consistently get google assistant to do is to set timers: "Ok google set timer for 5 minutes". I want more of that. Could they please just implement and document simple recipes like this? Setting a timer hands-free is already incredibly convenient, and I can only imagine making something similar for a wide host of tasks isn't /that/ hard. I really don't mind if I have to formulate it in a rather specific way, as long as it works and I can find out what that way is.

Re: Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

#39
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woz aside, I don't think people realize the increased mortality of being on the upper end of the (literal) scale. Here's a journal article: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... but to summarize BMI vs years lost: BMI 40-45 45-50 50-55 55-60 men -6.5 -10.8 -10.6 -17.0 women -6.9 -9.1 -10.3 -13.1

For my height 1.7 m I would have 10 weigh 115 kg to have a BMI of 40. Bloody hell, I count myself as overweight at the 74 kg I weigh now, BMI 26. Just can't imagine carrying an extra 41 kg! Doesn't surprise me at all that it would shorten my life. Never mind that but the life one has must be worse as well.

I just did that same calculation. My god. Would I even want to go 10 more years weighing 300 lbs?

I know BMI isn't 'perfect'. I think once you reach a certain weight class it becomes more and more relevant. There's no way more than a few fringe cases of people are 6'+ and 350+lbs of primarily muscle. Even NFL linemen are on average 6'4" and around 300lbs.

Edit: That linked article is incredible. It shows the primary driver of the increased mortality is from heart disease and diabetes. 5x more deaths from diabetes, 3x from heart disease, and 2x from digestive neoplasms, 16x lower respiratory, 5x liver disease. I'm going to continue my good exercise and dieting...

Re: Steve Wozniak says he does not expect fully autonomous cars 'in my lifetime'

#40
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car insurance: I had made a simplified argument, but to itemize, auto insurance may work the same for auto-theft and some liability coverage. But, it definitely cannot work the same for anything remotely related to driver (or in this case self-driving system's) fault. Edge Cases: Humans use their brain and adapt. Self driving systems have no concept of adapting, hence the result is undefined. > over 1.25 million deat…

Thanks for the correction, the 1.25 million number is worldwide, not US https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ Self driving systems however do adapt. Most companies are using neural networks which can be retrained based on their mistakes. Unlike a human, they can also be trained on each and every crash for which sensor data is available.

They cannot "adapt". Your "retraining" is not a trivial process. Attempts to accommodate edge cases are not guaranteed to be able to cleanly accommodate all previous cases without discontinuities/regression/overfitting. The consequences of which could be especially catastrophic given that every other vehicle that safely operates may be relying on a particular quirk of a particular version of the neural network's particular function which it is imitating to safely operate in it's particular environment.

That's the problem with NN's. You can't say anything about them explicitly except that they meet the specification for their training datasets. Fitness for a task outside of that is not guaranteed. Humans, on the other hand, are constantly adapting, because they never stop "learning". This has the inverse effect in that you can say that a person can be trained for a task, but at the moment may not be.

When you apply an NN on an industrial scale, you can't just throw it out there without being willing to accept the liability for the destruction you cause as a result.

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