Geohot was right. Tweet re: LIDAR, but still: "When this delusion ends and all these companies fold, it won't be LIDAR vs. Or ride sharing vs. None of this matters. All that matters is building an intelligent machine. Self driving is 100% a software problem. Given software written by God, a smartphone can drive a car." https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1577045884159676416?s=20...
I find that take fascinating. Its, in effect, saying "well, computer hardware and the human brain are similar enough; the human brain just got an evolutionary headstart on its software, so once we solve that we're golden". Not only is there no evidence to support this conclusion; its trivial to recognize that the human brain and computers operate differently, at a fundamental, logical level. The brain has no transistors. It doesn't care about XOR or solid state memory. There is literally no part of the human brain which even remotely resembles any internal part of a computer; not remotely.
Why is it so accepted that this problem can be solved in software? Or, maybe: it can be solved, but it will take so much computing power that any computer which could solve it in real time couldn't fit in or be powered by a car? Virtualizing linux on my Windows PC incurs a double-digit percentage performance penalty, and that's on the same ISA; what is the human brain's ISA? AI is an emulation of human behavior; what is it's performance penalty? Are we just surfing Moore's Law hoping to outrun it?
I just find the hubris of his statement baffling; that we, meaning Our Scientific Community, literally does not completely understand why or how acetaminophen works to alleviate pain in the human brain; yet they and Musk are wholly confident that given the same inputs their software can emulate the human brain's outputs.
I'll commit this to the public record, and feel free to revisit in ten years; if a synthetic brain system ever hits performance parity with the human brain in a task like driving or consciousness, it will be running on hardware that looks nothing like what I'm typing on. I suspect that even calling it "hardware", with emphasis on the word "hard", will seem antiquated. Maybe self driving is 100% a software problem; but the brain doesn't really differentiate.