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

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

#141

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 our ML systems were meaningfully intelligent, there's still the issue of proper training. You can't teach humans to be a safe drivers by showing them a huge slideshow of dash-cam images. Why do we expect ML to do any better?

> Even if our ML systems were meaningfully intelligent, there's still the issue of proper training. You can't teach humans to be a safe drivers by showing them a huge slideshow of dash-cam images.

That's an interesting concept to explore:

I would guess that videos could improve people's driving: Imagine new drivers; showing them videos of different situations, actions, and their outcomes, may help. The same videos might not help an experienced driver, but they might be helped by videos of more complex situations or by videos tailored to a specific driving skill.

But I'd be interested in research: When does such training help people and when does it not? What aspects of the training are effective or not?

And can that be applied to ML? It may be the old fallacy of conceiving of computers as 'thinking' like people, which Dijkstra compared to conceiving of submarines swimming like us.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The error rate would certainly go up at first due to the additional complexity, but the cost of each error goes down. Besides, I have to switch the speed at which I'm driving far more granularly than at county lines, and no one's worried about a car's ability to handle that.

I don't disagree that sometimes central decision making is good, but in a complicated situation where any decision will have some negative consequences depending on the specific context seems like a textbook case of not being one of them.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a per-mile-driven basis, Tesla's self-driving accident rate is somewhere in the region of 5-10× that of human drivers, IIRC. And keep in mind that the self-driving here is already in a state of selection bias where it's more likely to be used in safer conditions (i.e., fully-grade-separated highway driving in clear conditions, rather than dense urban environments in inclement weather).

Maybe you were thinking the autopilot accident rate being 5-10x _less_ than human drivers? > In the 2nd quarter, we recorded one crash for every 4.41 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.2 million miles driven. By comp…

You really can’t compare the average mile with the average autopilot mile. The best analogy I’ve heard is comparing human aircraft pilots (takeoffs, landings, weird old planes, all kinds of pilots) against aircraft autopilots only cruising at 30,000ft.

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

#144

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.

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…

Hey man, if we’re rebuilding roads for the sake of self driving cars, let’s just go back to ubiquitous light rail instead, like we had before cars got popular. This whole self-driving industry is so ridiculous when you consider that this has been a solved problem for over a hundred years..

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I considered this before posting, but I think that human disengagements are an important supervisory signal for the model. You can’t hire enough safety drivers to scale this process and releasing it is the fastest way to get there. Simulations are not going to get you all the way because you can’t simulate the real world perfectly. Do you have any thoughts on how to develop this without releasing it?

Waymo appears to disagree with you, they ran tests with safety drivers and in controlled conditions for a very long time, and they eventually got to the point where there are customers riding in unmanned taxis. Tesla is just applying a "move fast and break things" approach to pedestrians' lives in order to satisfy shareholder interests and executive egos. They're not the only ones, as we saw from Uber's absolutely sh…

I was under the impression that while Waymo did some tests unsupervised, most of the rides that non-employees can hail still have a supervisor. Is that not true?

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

#146

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.

Does Magnus Carlsen understand why chess moves are good? Does high depth stockfish or AlphaZero understand why moves are good? Why is Carlsen so relatively bad at chess with his understanding of the why?

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Is it worth killing n random people, for a uncalculated and unknowable chance of saving n+m lives in the future. The pool of people randomly selected to die have not volunteered or consented to be part of this project. There are ways to achieve the same lifesaving endgoal without the upfront sacrifice of lives. The part which really strikes me as morally reprehensible is where the companies are saving money on test…

> Is it worth killing n random people, for a uncalculated and unknowable chance of saving n+m lives in the future. The pool of people randomly selected to die have not volunteered or consented to be part of this project.

This reasoning renders any governmental policy change of any sort impermissible.

It isn't coherent to apply these forms of deontological ethics to state action - a random set of people will die with both state action and omission of action, I see no reason why not to pick the option with the smaller expected number of deaths.

But this is all besides my original point: this is a legitimate moral debate to have and the rhetoric used by the above commentator was entirely uncalled for.

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

#148

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.…

All true. But due to the hype we often see people trying to use overly complex ML models in problem domains where simpler deterministic statistical techniques such as linear regression analysis would be just as accurate with lower costs and better testability.

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you were thinking the autopilot accident rate being 5-10x _less_ than human drivers? > In the 2nd quarter, we recorded one crash for every 4.41 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.2 million miles driven. By comp…

I know there are several wildly different statistics for Tesla's crash rate. Some of these statistics suffer from poor data quality, and the first big study saying "Tesla is safer than average drivers!" was really affected by this (I don't recall the exact details, but the consensus of pretty much everyone not Tesla was the statistics were complete garbage).

I mean if you have data feel free to present it like I did.

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

#150
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with this is you're using the worst possible examples of driving as a benchmark, and that is quite a low standard to have. Take a look at the best possible examples, instead, and try to improve over that, then we're talking. You cannot be a shitty doctor and bring out an excuse like "Oh, but wait, this guy has lost more patients than me, so I'm fine". You really don't want to have a race to the bottom whe…

I'm not using it as a benchmark at all.

I'm using a high profile example to point out clear issues with how we handle human driver responsibility. If your negligence directly results in you killing someone, you should lose your license to drive.

If we someday reach the point where autonomous driving systems are actually 10x safer than human drivers and those systems still have issues with hitting emergency vehicles, we should absolutely hold those companies responsible for those accidents.

My point is that not holding those companies responsible would be less insane than our current practice of letting clearly negligent drivers continue to drive with minimal consequences after they kill someone.

So instead of being outraged about this hypothetical future, why not be outraged about the insane lack of consequences that drivers face currently?

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