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Self-driving as a case study for AGI

karpathy.github.io

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Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#101

Post by steveBK123 »

Seeing the guy who couldn't deliver FSD decide to make analogies from FSD to AGI does actually give me confidence we are decades away.

Yes, yes, I know there's like 1-2 companies that have highly modified vehicles that are pretty good, in a limited geofenced area, in good weather, at low speed, driving conservatively, local roads, most of the time. This is not "FSD".

They've been making very impressive incremental improvements every few years for sure. I had a Tesla for nearly 5 years and it was "wow" at first, and then "heh, I guess it's a little better" every year after that.

But when can I get in a taxi at JFK or on 5th Ave and get robotaxied through city streets, urban highway, off into the far suburbs? Could be a decade, if it happens. Just because we were able to make horses faster doesn't mean we flew horses to the moon.

Apply the same "sorta kinda almost" definition to AGI and yeah sure, maybe in 10 years. Really really actually solved? Hah.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#102

Post by steveBK123 »

jocoda wrote: post #100

Until recently I thought self driving was not going to happen. But in the early days of the car's history someone had to walk in front of the car as it went along, waving a red flag to warn people of this mechanical monstrosity. And now we have substantial societal adaptations, both legal and structural to support ubiquitous vehicular transport. Similar changes are on the way to support self driving. Our environment…

By that definition though, if we were anywhere close... I'd expect a peer AI power & authoritarian regime like China, which also focusses on EVs, to have some tier 2 city with robotaxi-only mandate by now and a working model for what it looks like.

Yet there are no signs of that. If anything they appear to be behind us.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#103

Post by jillesvangurp »

latexr wrote: post #93
jillesvangurp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a meaningless distinction. You basically get sucked into a "what has AI ever done for us?" style debate analogous to Monty Python's Life of Brian. It's impossible to resolve. But the irony of course is the huge and growing list of things it is actually doing quite nicely. We'll have decently smart AIs before we nail down what that G actually means, should mean, absolutely cannot mean, etc. Which is usually what…

> You basically get sucked into a "what has AI ever done for us?" style debate analogous to Monty Python's Life of Brian. Except today the bit (which wasn’t really a debate in the sketch because everyone agreed) would start with real current negatives such as accelerating the spread of misinformation and getting artists fired. In your analogy, it would be as if they were asking “what have the Romans ever done for us”…

I don't consider people having to adjust a negative. We don't have a right to never have to adjust or adapt to a changing world. Things change, people adapt. Well some of them. The rest just gets old and dies off. Artists will be fine; so will everybody else. If anything, people will have a lot more time to do artistic things. More than ever probably and possibly at a grander scale that past generations of artists could only dream about.

Misinformation, aka. propaganda, is as old as humanity. Probably even the Romans were whining about that back in the day. AIs are doing nothing new here. And it's not AIs spreading misinformation but people with an agenda that now use AIs as tools to generate it. People like that have always existed and they've always been creative users of whatever tools were available. We'll just have to deal with that as well and adapt.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#105

Post by DebtDeflation »

nextaccountic wrote: post #97
Radim wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "middleman" being other people, i.e. themselves from another's perspective. "These other people are useless, let's bypass them. But not me! I simply gain the ability to get anything I want." The lack of second-order thinking is hilarious.

The real issue is that we live in an economic system where people are exploited for labor, and in turn they buy products and services made with their own labor (and another class get to profit from it). If we introduce AGI but keep the system, people will be unemployed. If people aren't employed (and instead machines do their jobs), then they can't buy stuff. The whole system crumbles. But it's possible that AGI will…

Assume the existence of a large scale Star Trek Replicator that can almost instantly create anything.

There are only two possibilities that result:

1) We now live in a post-scarcity society where everyone self-actualizes and no one wants for anything.

2) We now live in a society where the small % of the population that owns the Replicators self-actualizes and wants for nothing while the remaining 99.9% of the population can f** off and die.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#106

Post by dopidopHN »

bilsbie wrote: post #104

Ten years ago my definition of AGI was that it can learn and improve itself across a wide range of unrelated problems. These days people seem to define if more as artificial super intelligence.

That fair, I had exponential growth of knowledge in the bingo cards for AGI as well.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#107

Post by dchftcs »

3asdf123 wrote: post #45
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already experience self driving cars by taking an Uber or a taxi, or being chauffeured if you are richer. None of that is new, the self driving aspect just promises to make those experiences perhaps more accessible (or at the very least, not less accessible than they are now). For example, I took a taxi to and from work every day when I lived in Beijing, which came to about 100 kuai/day for a 20-30 minute dri…

Yeah which I think the only remaining good application of self-driving car ( taxi ) doesn't bring that much convenient, since taxi here is already somewhat reasonably priced. I can't speak for the the US experience. Also the article touches briefly on drivers going into jobless. A lot of drivers where i'm from seems to be retiring middle-old age working in taxi. I think it's a good job fit for them and I don't know h…

A significant portion of taxi fares go to the driver, as opposed to the maintenance of cars. There are other marginal benefits such as making the driver's seat available, eliminating the driver's commute and as well as the risk of criminal driver behaviour, that probably offsets some of the drawbacks of having one fewer human being dealing with rare, complex non-driving situations such as a pregnant woman having to give birth in the car.

The economic benefit is significant to companies building self-driving cars, good enough to pursue if the tech is within reach. But to your point it's indeed much less of an improvement compared to various historical automation technologies that create >10x incremental efficiency gains.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#108

Post by Radim »

vladimirralev wrote: post #96
ben_w wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is that economy does not make sense without people. Economy is a way to allocate human work and resources, and provide incentives for humans to collaborate, factoring in the available resource limits. I disagree with the underlying presumption. We've been using animal labour since at least the domestication of wolves, and mechanical work since at least the ancient Greeks invented water mills. Even with re…

> With a fully automated economy, all 8 billion of us can have that We probably can't. I mean why stop at humans? Let's give every pet the same luxury, or ... in the limit we could give this to every living being. Ultimately someone is going to draw the line who gets what and who is useful or not "for the greater good". It just happens that many living beings don't contribute to the goals of whoever is in charge and…

Exactly right. It's playing out like a bankruptcy: "Slowly at first, then all at once".

Humans have rights insofar they're able to enforce them. Individually by withholding their labor (muscle or brain power), or collectively with pitchforks if need be.

Once labor is dime-a-dozen and pitchforks ineffective (OP's premise of "fully automated economy"), human rights and democracy go the way of dodo, inevitably. Nature loves to optimize away inefficiencies.

Although the "fully automated" bit is quite a stretch at the moment. The end-to-end supply chain required to produce & sustain advanced machinery and AI is too complex, a far cry from "LOL let's buy some GPU and run chatbots".

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#109

Post by quonn »

I can, in principle, take someone from a group of uncontacted peoples, put them into New York and let them figure out how to drive and they likely will be able to do it after not too much time. We are not even close to any technology that could figure out driving having never been built for it.

Re: Self-driving as a case study for AGI

#110

Post by steveBK123 »

quonn wrote: post #109

I can, in principle, take someone from a group of uncontacted peoples, put them into New York and let them figure out how to drive and they likely will be able to do it after not too much time. We are not even close to any technology that could figure out driving having never been built for it.

Likewise, it's remarkable what a home DIY'er can do given a couple power tools and 5 minutes of YouTube watching.
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