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The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

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Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider those machines AI?

Narrow AI, yes. If it simulates a human action and adapts to the environment to a small degree (e.g can recognize a screw bolt and pick it up even if it is in a different location every time), it's a narrow AI.

It can do even more than that. Warehouse organization, putting high usage/fast moving objects towards the front of the warehouse, reorganizing based on usage and expiration, restocking, kit packaging etc... Goes way beyond just picking things up with a fork lift and moving them to a different location. All things a person or team of people used to get paid in the 6 digits for are now just run by robots and AI.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#202

> The last people with jobs will be AI programmers Geohotz makes a decent point. The way the industrial revolution reduced manual labour, and made thinkers and tinkerers much more valuable, the advent of AI (true AI, mind you, not the tiny stuff that we currently assume) might actually make us obsolete. It is a peaceful and yet terrifying thought.

I've thought about this a lot before actually. In my opinion, the last people with jobs will be mathematicians. If you think about everything that would be hardest to automate, I think deep mathematical theory would be the most difficult (automated theorem provers have their limits).

I think this misinterprets what the history of the industrial revolution teaches us. When steam shovels replaced humans, it's not that only steam-shovel-makers had jobs anymore. Instead, new humans who would have been employed breaking rocks, were instead free to go invent or work in entirely new industries.

Entertainment, health care, and communications are industries that have exploded, in terms of economic value and employment, since the industrial revolution. One thing these industries have in common is that the value they provide is dependent on humans. People want to talk to people, see stories about people, and be healthy themselves. Technology enables these industries but technology does not replace the heart of the value.

Maybe someday if AI evolves into artifical persons, then AI could take part in conversations, be entertained, and wish to prevent it's own death. But that is probably a long way off, and might never come. It's not like people are working on artificial personalities now. No one is working on car AI that will tell its owner to fuck off, it's watching Mad Men and doesn't feel like driving.

The industrial approach to AI is to build better tools. Not to build new independent beings. Maybe it's possible that a tool can become a being, but we have no evidence at all that such a thing can happen.

So the future of employment will probably not be unemployment, it will be different employment. Truck driver jobs will get replaced by truck-driving AI, but the children of truck drivers won't miss it. They'll grow up in that world, and work in some other new industry, like virtual world designer or personal medical consultant or artist or athlete.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#204
post #4

> “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple. For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know.’ ” Yep, he's still in his twenties.

Typical twenty year olds don't read all the state-of-the-art papers on a subject before saying they know it all. It sounds more like he's caught up on the latest AI research and fundamentals.

People in their twenties wrote those papers.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#205
Like most hard problems, it's easy to pick off the low-hanging fruit and claim that you have solution.

Self-driving cars (in some form or the other, under some loose definition of "self" and "driving") have been around since the 20s. But it still remains a vexing problem.

It is quite easy to program a car to stay between 2 cars and follow the car in front. It is quite another to have the same car drive on (a) a road without lane markings; (b) in adverse weather conditions (snow, anybody? Hotz should take the car to Tahoe); (c) in traffic anomalies (ambulance/cop approaching from behind; accident/debris in front; etc. etc.); and so on.

No offense to GeoHot, but I'd love to see his system work in rush-hour 101 traffic; or cross the Bay Bridge, where (coming to SF) the lanes merge arbitrarily.

The key challenges are not only to drive when there's traffic; but to also drive when there's NO traffic, because lane markings, etc. are practically nonexistent in many places.

Having said all that, I still admire his enthusiasm and drive(no pun intended). Tinker on!

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the "hacker ethos" then I want nothing to do with it: > “I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” Hotz declared in the story. “Laws are something made by assholes.” > “ ‘If’ statements kill.” > “I want power. Not power over people, but power over nature and the destiny of technology. I just want to know how it all works.”

Hotz is pretty eccentric, but he's also pretty incredible. While technology wouldn't progress very far if everyone was like Hotz, I also don't think it would get very far without people like Hotz.

Exactly. You can appreciate aspects of a person and the work they do without deifying them in their entirety. Linus Torvalds and weev (being an extreme example) fall into this category.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#207
post #46
post #37

Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars. What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person. 1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals. 2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk. 3) Implement so…

Why is the first comment on HN minimizing this truly impressive project? Of course it's not perfect, he's ONE person.

I think it's fair given his mission to "crush Mobileye".

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: "Hotz hadn’t programmed any of these behaviors into the vehicle. He can’t really explain all the reasons it does what it does." Good luck to him understanding how to fix corner cases: he's built a black box.

This will be safe on the road for sure.

Are YOU safe on the road? Have you tested all corner cases on yourself?

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#210

> The last people with jobs will be AI programmers Geohotz makes a decent point. The way the industrial revolution reduced manual labour, and made thinkers and tinkerers much more valuable, the advent of AI (true AI, mind you, not the tiny stuff that we currently assume) might actually make us obsolete. It is a peaceful and yet terrifying thought.

> the advent of AI (true AI, mind you, not the tiny stuff that we currently assume) might actually make us obsolete. It is a peaceful and yet terrifying thought

We will become the children of our new AI parents. We are building our future caretakers.

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