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Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

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Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#321

Post by fasterik »

runarberg wrote: post #290
fasterik wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may have read too much into your original post. I think I get what you're saying now. We apply the concept of intelligence to other species, so I don't see why we couldn't apply it to machines. If people want to redefine intelligence so that humans stay on top, then they are wrong to do so. There is undeniably an objective component to it, even if there are many cultural factors at play as well. If you don't like t…

> As an aside, the human brain runs on relatively low power consumption and operations per second, so computational power isn't a bottleneck. You hit the nail on the head here (pun intended). Brains (and other adoptive biochemical processes which reinforce behavior) are way more ingenious then to be described as a simple computer. It is not just neurons firing in patterns with synapses which can reinforce certain pat…

I agree with you in the sense that I think many problems don't require general intelligence once you have a solution. However, to come to those solutions it took decades or centuries of intelligent humans working on those problems. The potential benefit of AGI isn't in automating the problems we already know how to solve (although it might help refine our solutions). It's in accelerating progress in domains where there are unsolved problems.

Sometimes we get hung up on comparing AI to humans. I wouldn't want an AI that does math and physics in the same way that humans do. Our brains aren't very good at those things. I'm more interested in the potential for AI to find new, more effective ways of working in these areas.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#322

Post by morpheos137 »

weavejester wrote: post #267
morpheos137 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever consider if the effective duty cycle of your car is increased the vehicle wears out quicker? The whole idea of autonomous robo taxis is bad on its face for many, many reasons. When will we grow up and admit it?

> Ever consider if the effective duty cycle of your car is increased the vehicle wears out quicker? Sure, but by how much? What's the average extra overhead per person? By that I mean, what's the average distance that a taxi would need to drive between dropping one person off, and picking the next person up. The more taxis there are, the lower the overhead, as the more likely it is a taxi will happen be nearby to som…

Overhead is the wrong metric. Depreciation over fixed costs, marginal variable cost (e.g. fuel, oil, etc), and opportunity cost are what you want to look at. If you use a car more it wears out faster and needs to be replaced sooner. It needs more fuel and more frequent preventative maintenance.

If the average trip is short the rob taxi does more trips and the effect is the same.

Who cleans up the car when a drunk stranger pukes in it while you are sleeping?

Who fuels it or charges it?

There are many reasons people don't share cars.

Lacking proper control software is not one.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#323

Post by morpheos137 »

fasterik wrote: post #215
runarberg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GAI is a pipe dream. There is no technology that we can even conceive—let alone build in the next 10-15 years—of which passes as GAI. Our current AI is based on statistical inference, GAI will need to be able to do far more than infer from data and interpolate actions. No we will never have GAI. --- I know never is a long time, but I can comfortably predict this because there is not only technological problems with G…

I'm trying to understand the worldview that leads to what you believe. As far as I can tell, you're assuming there is a supernatural aspect to the human mind. According to my worldview, humans are just robots built out of DNA, proteins, etc. The idea that machines couldn't do everything a human can do (and more) doesn't make any sense to me.

The simple difference is humans have the biological goal to replicate their genes. That is the root source of intelligence. Software does not because it has not evolved. If you want real AI then start with simulating life in a simulated environment as complex as the real world for many thousands or millions of generations.

Humans may be like robots but their programing is not statistical pattern matching or Boolean logic. Rather it is the intelligence selected for by evolution to achieve the goals of an individual organism.

How does this not make sense?

Intelligence does not just happen absent goal directed evolution.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#324

Post by fasterik »

morpheos137 wrote: post #323
fasterik wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand the worldview that leads to what you believe. As far as I can tell, you're assuming there is a supernatural aspect to the human mind. According to my worldview, humans are just robots built out of DNA, proteins, etc. The idea that machines couldn't do everything a human can do (and more) doesn't make any sense to me.

The simple difference is humans have the biological goal to replicate their genes. That is the root source of intelligence. Software does not because it has not evolved. If you want real AI then start with simulating life in a simulated environment as complex as the real world for many thousands or millions of generations. Humans may be like robots but their programing is not statistical pattern matching or Boolean l…

How does this not make sense?

As far as I can tell, your points don't apply to what I said. I'll quote myself:

>The idea that machines couldn't do everything a human can do (and more) doesn't make any sense to me.

In other words, it doesn't make sense to me when I hear impossibility arguments about AGI that appeal to something special about humans. I'm not making a claim about software and hardware in 2023. I'm saying in principle, there is nothing stopping us from building artificial systems that are just as complex and capable as evolved biological organisms, other than our lack of knowledge of how to build such systems.

>Software does not because it has not evolved

Software does evolve. To get evolution you need three things: replication, mutation, and selection pressure. We replicate, mutate, and select software all the time. I don't think you need a large scale simulation to get evolutionary dynamics.

>Humans may be like robots but their programing is not statistical pattern matching or Boolean logic

That might be true, but I'm also skeptical. Part of the problem is we don't really understand intelligence very well. If we really understood what makes humans capable of intelligent behavior, we would be able to replicate it in artificial systems. I don't see a fundamental barrier other than having the right algorithms.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#325

Post by weavejester »

morpheos137 wrote: post #322
weavejester wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ever consider if the effective duty cycle of your car is increased the vehicle wears out quicker? Sure, but by how much? What's the average extra overhead per person? By that I mean, what's the average distance that a taxi would need to drive between dropping one person off, and picking the next person up. The more taxis there are, the lower the overhead, as the more likely it is a taxi will happen be nearby to som…

Overhead is the wrong metric. Depreciation over fixed costs, marginal variable cost (e.g. fuel, oil, etc), and opportunity cost are what you want to look at. If you use a car more it wears out faster and needs to be replaced sooner. It needs more fuel and more frequent preventative maintenance. If the average trip is short the rob taxi does more trips and the effect is the same. Who cleans up the car when a drunk str…

> Overhead is the wrong metric. Depreciation over fixed costs, marginal variable cost (e.g. fuel, oil, etc), and opportunity cost are what you want to look at. If you use a car more it wears out faster and needs to be replaced sooner. It needs more fuel and more frequent preventative maintenance.

Sure, but you also need less cars, and the cars can be more specialized (i.e., smaller on average). Two 1500kg cars travelling 10km each, might be replaced by one 750kg robotaxi travelling 20km. Overall a significant reduction in fuel for the same two journeys.

And then there's the question of whether it's cheaper to have one car traveling 100,000km over 5 years, or two cars travelling 50,000km over 5 years. My guess is that fewer cars travelling further would be less expensive in most cases.

> Who cleans up the car when a drunk stranger pukes in it while you are sleeping? > > Who fuels it or charges it?

You'd hire someone to do it? The same way it works with rental cars or taxis today. That's part of the overhead I mean: is it more efficient for companies to maintain a specialized fleet of robotaxis, or for individuals to maintain a far larger fleet of generalized vehicles?

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#326

Post by runarberg »

fasterik wrote: post #324
morpheos137 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple difference is humans have the biological goal to replicate their genes. That is the root source of intelligence. Software does not because it has not evolved. If you want real AI then start with simulating life in a simulated environment as complex as the real world for many thousands or millions of generations. Humans may be like robots but their programing is not statistical pattern matching or Boolean l…

How does this not make sense? As far as I can tell, your points don't apply to what I said. I'll quote myself: >The idea that machines couldn't do everything a human can do (and more) doesn't make any sense to me. In other words, it doesn't make sense to me when I hear impossibility arguments about AGI that appeal to something special about humans. I'm not making a claim about software and hardware in 2023. I'm sayin…

You might be thinking about evolutionary learning (or more broadly evolutionary algorithms), which is a machine learning method different from—the more common and more successful—artificial neural networks. Several implementations actually exist, and I think some are even quite successful, but none that I’m aware of have been shown to have AGI capabilities.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#327

Post by upwardbound »

dragonwriter wrote: post #193
LarryMullins wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video showing perfidy committed by a Russian soldier in Ukraine. Several Russians were coming out of a building surrendering to some Ukrainian soldiers, when one of them came out with a gun and started shooting. All the Russians were killed in the subsequent firefight, because one of them ruined it for the rest. It may seem like a clever ruse in movies, but in real life it gets people killed.

> It may seem like a clever ruse in movies, but in real life it gets people killed. To be fair, the point of the ruse (in real wars; in heroic fiction this sometimes varies) is usually to get people killed, too; the question is just which people get killed.

It gets more people to die on ALL sides which is why it's considered a shitty thing to do, even if it's technically a "valid" tactic in some anarchic philosophies. The use of this ruse will cause people to stop accepting surrender which is BAD because it means that the people who die will be the average Joe and average Ivan in different countries who really don't want to kill anyone and just want to go back to their family and their life. These goodhearted people just want to go home and would gladly surrender. Imagine this thought experiment. I'll use your pen name dragonwriter as the name of a hypothetical super-human bandit / assassin / mercenary / gun for hire who sometimes does jobs like assassinations and Mission Impossible style burglaries of royal treasure. Imagine the DragonWriter bandit has no qualms about killing and so anyone who stands in his way gets shot with the intent to kill, AND now there are some rumors that a group of cops had DragonWriter surrounded and so he surrendered to them but then he pulled out a hidden sword and spun in a circle chopping them all in half. Now, any time DragonWriter tries to surrender in the future, his surrender won't be accepted, but what's even worse is: his action that bought him maybe a 5 second advantage (vs a million different other ways he could have won or fled the fight), and this tiny temporary advantage by the ruse has imposed a cost in exchange:

This one infamous sword fight has now poisoned the well with respect to the global norm. Next time there's some other totally unaffiliated hat-wearing super-powered bandit who's stealing the Ark of the Covenant or the royal diamond or something, if THAT bandit tries to surrender, there's a high chance that person might be killed, because their surrender is distrusted since DragonWriter changed the norm and now every fight between supers and cops is now on "shoot to kill, no prisoners, take no quarter" stakes. Imagine how many times a famous super like Batman would have been killed if the authorities never accept a surrender because the surrender norm is ruined. It can be repaired but that might take a decade or more to repair the trust that was broken.

With strong norms about surrender, red cross medics being protected, etc., we can have things like the miracle of the WW1 Christmas Truce which help the war to be a little bit little less of pure hell, for all the pure-hearted or indifferent people dragged into being a soldier, perhaps even drafted or press-ganged, to be the disposable cannon fodder for a bloody and disease and gas drenched war for no good reason more than rich politicians' egos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

These people just want to go back home to their wife or their mum and would gladly gladly surrender if given the chance, but that's not possible if someone ruins the norm! It's like, for example even if someone is a super-villain for example, they should really not take human lives of innocent people, or destroy irreplaceable cultural heritage sites, or damage/burn an ecological area like a rain forest, because those, once lost, are forever gone, and leave our world impoverished.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#328

Post by Tv9m »

chongli wrote: post #289
Tv9m wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#329

Post by Tv9m »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #282
Tv9m wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thr…

> 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.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#330

Post by Tv9m »

prometheus76 wrote: post #301
Tv9m wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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