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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

#171

Post by machinelearning »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #50
machinelearning wrote: post #42

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?

> You can’t hire enough safety drivers to scale this process and releasing it is the fastest way to get there. I am sorry but I sincerely hope you are never made responsible for the release of anything remotely safety-critical. Please re-read what you wrote. You are saying that because a business does not have enough money/resources to scale a process in real-world conditions that the solution is to release something…

Hey man, I understand this is a sensitive topic that people have strong opinions on so proposing something that sounds controversial can trigger a lot of assumed conclusions. Can we take a step back for a sec?

First, before we assume that it is inherently risky to release this tech in the public, let's consider where the risk comes from.

There is some risk caused by the inadequacy of the technology to handle certain edge cases. This can result in the vehicle making dangerous maneuvers. However this risk is mitigated by allowing the driver to control the car as soon as the car does something wrong. I'd imagine that the vast majority of errors like this can be handled safely by a human driver who's vigilant and has control of the car.

Some unknown proportion of these might be unavoidable accidents caused by the self-driving software that a human would have probably made too (e.g. a deer running onto the road).

Another possibility is that the self-driving car causes an error that a human might otherwise not have caused and could not have been avoided by a human taking control. If you group the latter two cases together, and the accident rate is lower than that of the driver without self-driving enabled, you could argue that it has a positive impact.

The other source of error is human error. Some argue that self-driving makes people complacent and they might not be as vigilant as if they were operating the vehicle themselves. I think companies are trying to address this too by implementing driver monitoring systems, however this is completely avoidable by the passenger and its a stretch to say that self-driving cars are risking human lives because of this.

Hopefully I have conveyed the reasons why I don't think public testing is necessarily inherently risking human lives (of course this is dependent on the state of the tech being released). I'm sure you understand that every company has a limited runway and a window of opportunity to scale their technology. I am 100% with you on making sure that the product doesn't risk people's lives recklessly. However, I think the optics of this make it seem like far more lives are at risk than reality. I'm open to changing my mind as more information about the safety of the tech comes out but I am not de facto against it for the reasons I mentioned above.

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

#172

Post by mullingitover »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #130
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.

> If Tesla solves driving it will lead to tens of thousands of lives saved a year. That’s a big if. If we solved aging, we’d save nearly all lives, so please don’t regulate my medical practice. I expect to have aging solved and millions of treatments rolled out by 2020.

Solving aging would be a massive win for humanity at the individual level, and a horrific catastrophe at the species level.

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

#173

Post by klyrs »

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?

No, absolutely not. I'd say that Tesla flirts with the opposite outcome, that we saw with nuclear power. Early catastrophic failures resulting from premature deployment can produce a very reasonable revulsion away from the technology, such that the technology will have a PR problem well past the "break even" point. That folks continue to be bullish on self-driving tech despite cars repeatedly hitting stopped emergency vehicles at speed tells me that tech enthusiasts haven't learned from history.

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

#174

Post by postalrat »

klyrs wrote: post #173
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?

No, absolutely not. I'd say that Tesla flirts with the opposite outcome, that we saw with nuclear power. Early catastrophic failures resulting from premature deployment can produce a very reasonable revulsion away from the technology, such that the technology will have a PR problem well past the "break even" point. That folks continue to be bullish on self-driving tech despite cars repeatedly hitting stopped emergenc…

The problem nuclear power has had is nuclear reactors are a great tool to build materials for a nuclear bomb. If everyone accepted them then access to nuclear weapons would have been a lot easier.

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

#175

Post by BurningFrog »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #124
BurningFrog wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you save a child from drowning you don't get a 'a kill coupon' you can retrieve next time you are accused of murder.

Deliberate murders of individuals are morally very different from tiny risks of deaths in a large population.

Nothing good comes from trying to treat them as the same.

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

#176

Post by klyrs »

postalrat wrote: post #174
klyrs wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, absolutely not. I'd say that Tesla flirts with the opposite outcome, that we saw with nuclear power. Early catastrophic failures resulting from premature deployment can produce a very reasonable revulsion away from the technology, such that the technology will have a PR problem well past the "break even" point. That folks continue to be bullish on self-driving tech despite cars repeatedly hitting stopped emergenc…

The problem nuclear power has had is nuclear reactors are a great tool to build materials for a nuclear bomb. If everyone accepted them then access to nuclear weapons would have been a lot easier.

Are you implying that autonomous navigation isn't a stepping stone to powerful weapons?

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

#177

Post by postalrat »

klyrs wrote: post #176
postalrat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem nuclear power has had is nuclear reactors are a great tool to build materials for a nuclear bomb. If everyone accepted them then access to nuclear weapons would have been a lot easier.

Are you implying that autonomous navigation isn't a stepping stone to powerful weapons?

Useful but not on the level of access to nukes.

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

#178

Post by klyrs »

postalrat wrote: post #177
klyrs wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that autonomous navigation isn't a stepping stone to powerful weapons?

Useful but not on the level of access to nukes.

That remains to be seen. Mass-produced autonomous drones could quite conceivably get similar kill counts as nukes.

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

#179

Post by wildermuthn »

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.

True. I find it helpful to think of current DL models as a form of the reptilian brain — information processing and, at best, instinctual pattern recognition.

Intelligence is different kind of processing. It resides in the particular form of processing most often found in the mammalian brain — a processing we know intimately as conscious experience. Every human thought, word, and innovation formed within human consciousness. There’s no difference between consciousness and intelligence — they are the same.

It’s here at the “hard problem” that most (but not all) ML research turns aside to follow the “bitter lesson”, hoping that the difference between instinct and intelligence is merely one of scale.

But as OP points out, the difference is one of kind.

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

#180

Post by whimsicalism »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #159
robrenaud wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Why is Carlsen so relatively bad at chess with his understanding of the why? I think you have it backwards. Stockfish probably could tell you which specific 30-depth line changed its evaluation, while a human player is much more likely to play based on feel and intuition

Alphazero couldn't.
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