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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

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post #151
post #113

> Businesses are also shifting their focus away from “AI-as-a-service” vendors who promise to carry out tasks straight out of the box, like magic. Instead, they are spending more money on data-preparation software, according to Brendan Burke, a senior analyst at PitchBook. He says that pure-play AI companies like Palantir Technologies Inc. and C3.ai Inc. “have achieved less-than-outstanding outcomes,” while data scie…

> And, for that matter, a market cap of $50b is 'less than outstanding'? Less than outstanding outcomes Market cap is their outcome, not their clients' outcomes. The two are decidedly different things, especially in our weird distorted market.

Burke specifies "valuations" as well as outcomes, so the observation stands. (Not that Palantir is any kind of monopoly... If you will recall, the usual criticism is that it's just a consulting shop with zero moat or monopoly.)

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Even if this is the case, why does it matter? Because people are using Deep-learning over single-lens cameras to replace depth-perception... and then wondering why the cars that do this run into stationary objects with flashing lights. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INOA-PE21020-1893.PDF No one really cares about where deep learning works. People are complaining about all the areas where deep learning is fai…

The semantic understanding problem, more generally, is under-acknowledged in autonomous driving.

A human can tell the difference of a child standing by the side of a road, about to throw a ball into the road; vs a child standing at the side of a road, waiting for a bus. A human will slow down in anticipation of the likely outcome. A robot without state awareness will be extremely limited in available responses.

Without a useful state model of the universe (i.e. concept awareness), you're limited to purely reactive behaviors.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One immediately obvious issue is comparing Tesla vehicles, which are all relatively new vehicles typically owned by relatively older drivers to all other passenger vehicle.

The other immediately obvious issue is that the self driving features of a Tesla probably work best in ideal conditions, where human drivers also do.

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

#164
post #53
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about risk trade off. If it's 2x better than humans is it worth it? 10x? 100x? 36,096 deaths in 2019 in U.S. ~1.3 million worldwide (I couldn't find injury statistics this morning) If the flaw is found before someone dies from it I'm not concerned. If 1 person dies instead of 10 I'm all for it. (I'd take 2x better than humans any day)

We can’t ignore core usability and basic safety issues by saying “on average, this is better.” End users can’t be expected to know that they’ll probably be fine, but an edge case they don’t understand will kill them one evening when they drive past a stopped ambulance.

Why not? If it saves 30,000 lives per year is that not a meaningful improvement? I suspect my understanding/acceptance of "unknown risk while driving" is flawed in some way, or at least very different from the general populace.

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

#165
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about risk trade off. If it's 2x better than humans is it worth it? 10x? 100x? 36,096 deaths in 2019 in U.S. ~1.3 million worldwide (I couldn't find injury statistics this morning) If the flaw is found before someone dies from it I'm not concerned. If 1 person dies instead of 10 I'm all for it. (I'd take 2x better than humans any day)

The problem is, it's not a level playing field. 100 incidents of a person ploughing into a bus queue and killing a child, each is news for a day, everyone accepts the tragedy and moves on. A self-driving car does it once though, and the mob will be at the factory gates with torches and pitchforks.

That's an interesting problem. I wonder what social discussions need to take to reach acceptance for "AI assisted driving". Mandatory AI breaking to prevent driving into a bus queue?

I'm also curious how to find the people who do object vs theory-crafting all possible concerns people could have.

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Munro is very critical of many aspects of car design; I cannot understand why he's such a fan of FSD. Maybe due to personal profit? https://old.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/kxj0or/twitter_s...

TLDR: Munro admits to owning a bunch of Tesla stock, and there is a drastic change in his opinions of Tesla before he owned Tesla stock vs after.

there is a drastic change in his opinions of Tesla before he owned Tesla stock vs after.

I'm confident that this would apply to just about anyone that has ever bought, and then sold, Tesla stock. Because, and I don't mean to overstate the obvious, if one's opinion didn't change then why sell the stock?

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

#167
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if this is the case, why does it matter? Because people are using Deep-learning over single-lens cameras to replace depth-perception... and then wondering why the cars that do this run into stationary objects with flashing lights. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INOA-PE21020-1893.PDF No one really cares about where deep learning works. People are complaining about all the areas where deep learning is fai…

The semantic understanding problem, more generally, is under-acknowledged in autonomous driving. A human can tell the difference of a child standing by the side of a road, about to throw a ball into the road; vs a child standing at the side of a road, waiting for a bus. A human will slow down in anticipation of the likely outcome. A robot without state awareness will be extremely limited in available responses. Witho…

That's still ignoring the problem. "Self-driving" tech is no where near that. You gotta set your expectations correctly.

We're at the "Firetruck with flashing lights was hit at full speed on FSD mode" stage of the problem. This means that the depth-field mapping broke. The car was unable to tell how far away the firetruck was, and plowed full speed into the firetruck.

Its very telling that the other self-driving companies are using LIDAR to build the depth map, instead of trying to create depth-maps through deep learning.

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

#168
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

The problem is rail is horrible at traffic handling and uses time multiplexing. One guilded age unethical activity was deliberately creating "traffic jams" on competitor's lines. While rail is good and could use expansion it makes a dubious complete replacement. It works wonderfully with shared routes but fails at handling the "amalgamation" part.

Even Japan still uses trucks for the last mile and they have embraced it enough to have "bullet train suburbs" around stations.

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

#170

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.

Your certainty in it not existing to a level of alarm is just as ridiculous as your argument that "Tesla, et al" are lying of the capabilities of AI.

Yes, most people do not know what the difference between ML, AI, neural nets, and computation is - nonetheless we've reached the point in humanity where there is no question a pandora's box has been opened. There is very real reason why there would even be gag orders on public information given an entity achieved some level of strong AI.

And to your point of it just requiring more training, yeah, it kinda is that simple for the majority of tasks which is also enough to offer serious contemplation. A very wide depth of weak AI solutions that fake "strong ai" will probably be more dangerous long-term than a true "strong ai" solution due to the fine-tuning problems it would naturally have.

Big discussion, overall we need to be less certain on the state of things because there is very good reason why such an event would _not even be obvious when it happened_. A time of uncanny valley at the most and then you realize oh shit, AI has been running the world since... APT and DDoS patterns.

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