I hope it is. I wouldn't trust a seven-month-old to drive my car.
Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
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Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#22I think it should be obvious to most of us that intelligence is a combination of statistical learning, tree search, and the kind of generalized knowledge about the physical world the article is talking about. I don't believe any of the three components alone can excel at any meaningful or interesting task. ML can play go, but can't fold clothes, isn't it absurd? Going back to self-driving, the main challenge on the r…
"ML-based FSD is a dead end, always has been from the beginning" To be fair, Google's (Waymo's) FSD is most definitely not fully ML-based, and afaik neither is Tesla's. Sure some people may speak like that's the case, but the technical approaches these companies take are not so naive.
Surely with this amount of money and some of the smartest people working on the tech it won't be naive. It is however naive to think that a technology that can play the go game (also a mixed tree search + ML system!) can also navigate in the real world while causing minimal damage to the objects around it.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#23No, and the constant desire to apply the same scale of intelligence to dramatically different things is absolutely nonsense. A self-driving car does not need to understand the world in a way a human does, nor can it actually do so. It needs to understand the world in a way that enables it to successfully complete its assigned tasks. Full stop. Is an orange as smart as a screwdriver? Is an ant as smart as a waterfall?…
I encourage you to read the article (see link to full article below), or at least the first few paragraphs, and you'll notice that what you think you know from the headline is not what this article is about.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. In the recent weeks I was considering to subscribe to the economist. But if this is the quality of their writing on a subject I can judge then I would rather not poison my mind with articles from them which I have no expertise over.
I am not sure, I think it is an almost acceptable introduction for the layman to the divergence between deterministic, classic AI and in-focus, out of ANN functions AI. It gives the reader a notion that the divergent paths exist - but not much further structured historic or divulgative context. Interesting and informative notions, e.g. the existence of fuzzy logic based systems, or artificial vision as tending to rel…
> it is an almost acceptable introduction for the layman to the divergence between deterministic, classic AI and in-focus, out of ANN functions AI.
I agree with that. And if all that the article would do there would be nothing wrong with that.
But it goes further and makes sweeping statements about the state of self driving cars in general.
It talks about using machine learning to classify stop signs, and then writes: "Similar techniques are used to train self-driving cars to operate in traffic."
Which might be true for some systems, but not for others.
If you read this article you would think that present day self-driving cars are just a bunch of machine learning hooked up to a steering wheel. There are systems like that, but many people question their safety. Most other systems follow a hybrid approach, where there are machine learning components surrounded by old fashioned robotics. Leveraging the strong suits of both approaches.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#25No
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#26No, and the constant desire to apply the same scale of intelligence to dramatically different things is absolutely nonsense. A self-driving car does not need to understand the world in a way a human does, nor can it actually do so. It needs to understand the world in a way that enables it to successfully complete its assigned tasks. Full stop. Is an orange as smart as a screwdriver? Is an ant as smart as a waterfall?…
I encourage you to read the article (see link to full article below), or at least the first few paragraphs, and you'll notice that what you think you know from the headline is not what this article is about.
I did read the article, prior to posting my comment. My thoughts remain the same.
I encourage you to not assume you know what others are thinking.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#27A dog is smarter than a 7-month old. Maybe dogs could drive cars after all.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#28I think it should be obvious to most of us that intelligence is a combination of statistical learning, tree search, and the kind of generalized knowledge about the physical world the article is talking about. I don't believe any of the three components alone can excel at any meaningful or interesting task. ML can play go, but can't fold clothes, isn't it absurd? Going back to self-driving, the main challenge on the r…
> Really, where is this enthusiasm around ML coming from
Because the ML based approaches to exactly the kind of problem you are describing are the most effective which have appeared for a long time. This isn't just hype (though the hype will paper over the still huge difficulties involved in applying this approach), it's genuinely the only approach which has much hope of working (It's also worth pointing out that these systems are almost universally a collection of subsystems each of which employs neural nets or other ML approaches to varying degrees, not a single black box).
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#29That's the reason why I think that Tesla's approach to self driving is a dead end.
They are trying to copy the way humans drive, using vision and pattern recognition, but without real, high level intelligence behind it. The problem described in the article is just one aspect of it: a human will know that a bicycle is hidden behind the van, and he know how bicycles tend to behave and be ready when it pops out. An AI, most likely not, it means the reasoning of "if humans don't need X to drive, then neither does a self-riving car" is flawed, X can be lidar, annotated maps, machine-to-machine communication, etc....
I personally think that self-driving cars need every help they can get in order to make up for their lack of intelligence. They already have 100% awareness and superhuman reflexes, but if they can get things like extra sensors, that's even better. It may not get the bicycle behind the van, but it can somewhat compensate by catching it a fraction of a second earlier as it pops out, or maybe by knowing though prerecorded maps that it is a place where bikes are expected.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#30I think it should be obvious to most of us that intelligence is a combination of statistical learning, tree search, and the kind of generalized knowledge about the physical world the article is talking about. I don't believe any of the three components alone can excel at any meaningful or interesting task. ML can play go, but can't fold clothes, isn't it absurd? Going back to self-driving, the main challenge on the r…
I think that's an overly pessimistic view.
For one, those are all situations people get wrong all of the time. FSD doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than humans.
Two, once FSD is better than humans in most conditions, we can build infrastructure around it. Things like FSD only lanes to reduce erratic human driving etc.
The way I see it - solving FSD on highways seems like a very solvable and economically valuable thing to solve, even in limited ways (i.e. dedicated lanes).
Time will tell.