For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore • Hacker News Board

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#101

Post by leesec » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #97

leesec wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how super pro regulation people never consider the lives lost caused by slow regulation. If Tesla solves driving it will lead to tens of thousands of lives saved a year. Since 2015 there have been 20 deaths in 16 accidents related to autopilot, globally. Doesn't sound like a lot in comparison to highway death numbers, over 6 years.

It's funny how people ignoring regulation, that developed during decades for very valid reasons, usually do so to further businesses and projects that benefit greatly by doing so. Tesla is one example when it comes to self-driving, Uber another one when it come to the Taxi business. All for the greater good of course.

You think Uber doesn't provide a good service to the world? You are in favor of Taxi/Medallion monopolies?

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#102

Post by gibsonf1 » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

ChefboyOG wrote: post #93

gibsonf1 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its all artificial but no Intelligence. Statistical pattern matching, no matter how sophisticated, does not understand "why" from conceptually thinking about a space/time model of the world as we humans do.

Even if this is the case, why does it matter? If the explicit goal is to create a human intellect, then sure, there's a really interesting conversation there—one that is happening constantly in the DL/AI research community, in which virtually no one believes that we're close to AGI or that current deep learning is going to achieve it. But that's explicitly not the goal that 99.9% of neural networks are designed with.…

The issue is that people think that neural net technology is AI when, in fact, there is 0 Intelligence there. Which is fine, except when you have people like Elon Musk, Google and others thinking that there is I there, just need to throw more processors and data at it, and I will magically emerge. We now face a growing number of non-I cars on the road starting to kill people, so it's a real urgent problem that all who use neural nets need to, at minimum, understand that that tech will never give I and to communicate that fact to their customers and their goals with using it.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#103

Post by BurningFrog » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

leesec wrote: post #91

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" It seems like authorities are struggling" I would rather describe it as sleeping at the wheel, passed out drunk and having pissed their pants after vomiting a bottle of hard liquir. Okay, maybe i got carried away with the metaphor, but you get the idea

It's funny how super pro regulation people never consider the lives lost caused by slow regulation. If Tesla solves driving it will lead to tens of thousands of lives saved a year. Since 2015 there have been 20 deaths in 16 accidents related to autopilot, globally. Doesn't sound like a lot in comparison to highway death numbers, over 6 years.

If new technology X saves 100 lives for each person it kills, it will be banned.

Because the dead person has a name, a tragic story, and grieving relatives, which will make the news.

The 100 saved people are anonymous, don't know they were saved by X, and this will be unreported outside of obscure research journals.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#104

Post by clairity » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

ChefboyOG wrote: post #93

gibsonf1 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its all artificial but no Intelligence. Statistical pattern matching, no matter how sophisticated, does not understand "why" from conceptually thinking about a space/time model of the world as we humans do.

Even if this is the case, why does it matter? If the explicit goal is to create a human intellect, then sure, there's a really interesting conversation there—one that is happening constantly in the DL/AI research community, in which virtually no one believes that we're close to AGI or that current deep learning is going to achieve it. But that's explicitly not the goal that 99.9% of neural networks are designed with.…

the problem is the unboundedness of the failure modes of (the current generation of) AI, not with how well it can approximate hard functions within regions of interest (which is essentially always a small subset of the range of said hard functions).

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#105

Post by whimsicalism » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #94

whimsicalism wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sorry but I sincerely hope you are never made responsible for the release of anything remotely safety-critical. Wild to infer that from someone asking a hypothetical ethical question. Why are so many on this site so aggro?

Had to google aggro, no aggression intended at all, but I frankly found the severity of GP question too scary to be considered. > I considered this before posting ... To me this is not someone asking a hypothetical but someone who is aware that what they are about to write is controversial yet are still considering it to be the best way forward. I happened to strongly disagree with that.

If there is clear evidence that these cars would have lower fatality rates than human drivers (I don't think this evidence currently exists), then holding off release to continue development is potentially a moral bad, for the same reason that we end clinical trials early when they demonstrate clear life-saving potential that would save lives in the control group.

I don't think it is morally reprehensible to ask what other people's intuition around this problem is.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#106

Post by hef19898 » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

leesec wrote: post #101

hef19898 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how people ignoring regulation, that developed during decades for very valid reasons, usually do so to further businesses and projects that benefit greatly by doing so. Tesla is one example when it comes to self-driving, Uber another one when it come to the Taxi business. All for the greater good of course.

You think Uber doesn't provide a good service to the world? You are in favor of Taxi/Medallion monopolies?

Not necessarily, just the a huge portion of Ubers competitive advantage comes from ignoring existing rules. Rules incumbents do follow.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#107

Post by candiodari » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

gibsonf1 wrote: post #83

rootusrootus wrote: post #76

I've lost count of the number of people I've talked to who think that neural nets means we've created brains that will just magically learn how to do new tasks. So we just need more training and then automated is just around the corner. Tesla, et al do not have the luxury of ignorance to explain that away however, they know what the technology is and is not currently capable of, but they don't want to admit it.

Its all artificial but no Intelligence. Statistical pattern matching, no matter how sophisticated, does not understand "why" from conceptually thinking about a space/time model of the world as we humans do.

That's doesn't seem true. In the short term AI algorithms clearly understand why they do things. Yes, the time horizon is obviously shorter (not in games, but in the real world, sure), but the same can often be said of humans.

If you see humans responding to animals that don't use eyes (e.g. bats, insects) fuckups are a constant. We are very bad at interacting with anything that doesn't have something similar to our eyes to observe the world.

And third, the world has almost entirely been rebuilt to compensate for human observation flaws. It's not just staircases having a step height that works well with humans, but for example highway intersections have been changed 100 times until we found one that humans respond to in a manner different from slamming into the split. The same is true for many intersections (I first started realizing this when reading an article that an intersection with a bridge was modified because 5 people died when a car crushed them against the side of the bridge. It was redesigned. Now we find that an algorithm with an entirely different set of observations makes different mistakes ... not really that strange. Perhaps we should start modifying streets algorithms misjudge).

For example the warning cones for when you have an accident or road works or the like have also been adapted many times because version X was "causing too many accidents".

So in a bunch of cases it's neither that humans don't have big observational flaws or that algorithms have many more. It's just that we largely eliminated the human ones. Not by eliminating them from humans, but by eliminating them from the world.

Same is true on the inside of buildings.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#108

Post by whimsicalism » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #57

machinelearning wrote: post #37

Question for people here: Is it justifiable to accept these flaws in the short-term if it results in a car that has a lower-error rate than human drivers in the medium/long-term?

Hm. I find this very analogous to the MRNA vaccine debate: how high an error rate of a new technology do we accept, and to what degree does that choice have to be made at a community rather than an individual level? I'd feel best if that decision was made at the smallest community level possible, so ideally county by county rather than federally. That lightens the burden of politicians making the wrong choice or bein…

You get far more localized really shitty situations if you devolve to that level. Sometimes central decision making is good.

Having to switch the mode of operation of your car depending on what side of various county lines you are on seems like an obvious regulatory failure.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#109

Post by Consultant32452 » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

Iolaum wrote: post #15

amelius wrote: post #11

What will happen if a deep-learning bug is found in Tesla autopilot where it misclassifies a fire truck for a bridge? Will they ground all the Tesla cars remotely? Or disable autopilot remotely? Until they have gathered new training data and updated the software?

To add context. In Aviation, if they do find a bug in the software running an airplane's engine they do ground planes until they know more about impact and mitigation. Not saying cars should do the same, just that it's not absurd to consider it.

I’ll be happy if “AI” cars are safer than human drivers on average. Zero accidents/deaths can come later.

If everyone was flying their personal planes around and constantly banging into each other a minor software bug would not ground any planes. It would be more like a malfunctioning airbag recall.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#110

Post by shkkmo » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #67

3dfan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time people are allowed to let their cars drive unsupervised, the crash rate of AI versus human will probably be 1:10 or so. So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to time, it would be better to let them do their thing. Otherwise people will grab the steering wheel, drive drunk, sleepy, angry etc and ram into all kinds of things again. Currently, there are 6 million car accidents per year in th…

>By the time people are allowed to let their cars drive unsupervised, the crash rate of AI versus human will probably be 1:10 or so. This sort of statement keeps being parroted over and over again. As Linus would say, talk is cheap, show me the code ; then we can speak. >So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to time [...] This is just insane, honestly, and if this is the premise that guides the devel…

The entire way we approach driver liability in general is insane.

The Attorney General of South Dakota was looking at his phone, swerved into the shoulder, killed man and then left the scene. He claimed he thought he hit a deer, even though the victim's head went through the windshield and the victims glasses were later found inside the car.

What consequences did the Attorney General face? Was his licence revoked or suspended? Did he serve any jail time? Did he resign? The answer to all of these is "No." The only result was two misdemeanors and a 500 dollar fine.

So yes, accepting occaisonal inhuman errors from a system that is 10x safer (hypothetical, no current systems have this record) than human drivers may also be insane but it would still be far more sane than the current approach to human drivers.