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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#381

Post by DiscourseFan »

ekunazanu wrote: post #178
bscphil wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel I understand the argument for augmenting your self-driving systems with LIDAR. What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. The comparison case for a "road-runner style fake tunnel" isn't LIDAR, it's humans, right? And while I'm sure there are cases where a human driver would spot the fake tunnel and stop in time, that is…

> Is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads That would've been been the case if all laws, opinions and purchasing decisions were made by everyone acting rationally. Even if self driving cars are safer than human drivers, it just takes a few crashes to damage their reputation. It has to be much, much safer than humans for mass adoption. Ideally also safer than the competition, if you're comparing s…

And Waymo is much safer than human drivers. Its better at chauffeuring than humans, too.

Re: AI is different

#382

Post by howtofly »

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system).

Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste (resulting from consumption). Human technology merely enables the extraction of natural resources across magnitudes, without actually creating any resources. Given its enormous energy consumption, I strongly doubt that AI will contribute to a better economic system.

Re: AI is different

#383

Post by silver_silver »

ahurmazda wrote: post #13

When I hear folks glazing some kinda impending jobless utopia , I think of the intervening years. I shudder. As they say, "An empty stomach knows no morality."

Realistically, a white collar job market collapse will not directly lead to starvation. The world is not 1930s America ethically. Governments will intervene, not necessarily to the point of fairness, but they will restructure the economy enough to provide a baseline. The question will be how to solve the biblical level of luxury wealth inequality without civil unrest causing us all to starve.

Re: AI is different

#384

Post by diggan »

howtofly wrote: post #382

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste (resulting from consumption). Human technology merely enables the extraction of natural resources across magnitudes, without actually creating any resources. Given its enormous energy consumption, I strongl…

> Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste

What a sad way of viewing huge fields of creative expressions. Surely, a person sitting on a chair in a room improvising a song with a guitar is producing something not considered "waste"?

Re: AI is different

#385

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ACCount37 wrote: post #296
thephotonsphere wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

Humans are notoriously bad at driving, especially in poor weather. There are more than 6 million accidents annually in the US, which is >16k a day.

Most are minor, but even so - beating that shouldn't be a high bar.

There is no good reason not to use LIDAR with other sensing technologies, because cameras-only just makes the job harder.

Re: AI is different

#386

Post by djeastm »

sota_pop wrote: post #144
itsalotoffun wrote: post #136

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that. [Emphasis added] What a silly premise. Markets don't care . All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. Seeing a real uptick of socio-policital prognostication from…

> “… as a voting… as a weighing…” I’m sure I remember that as a graham, munger, or buffet quote. > “not even wrong” - nice, one of my favorites from Pauli.

Definitely Benjamin Graham, though Buffett (two T's) brought it back

Re: AI is different

#387

Post by motorest »

juniperus wrote: post #343
andrepd wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet people live better. Goes to show you shouldn't optimise for crude, raw GDP as an end in itself, only as a means for your true end: health, quality of life, freedom, etc.

In many of the metrics, yeah. But Americans can afford larger houses and more stuff essentially, which isn't necessarily a good replacement for general quality of life things.

> In many of the metrics, yeah. But Americans can afford larger houses and more stuff essentially, which isn't necessarily a good replacement for general quality of life things.

I think this is the sort of red herring that prevents the average US citizen from realizing how screwed over they are. Again, the median household income in the US is lower than in some European countries. On top of this, the US provides virtually no social safety net or even socialized services to it's population.

The fact that the average US citizen is a paycheck away from homelessness and the US ranks so low in human development index should be a wake-up call.

Re: AI is different

#388

Post by mcherm »

howtofly wrote: post #382

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste (resulting from consumption). Human technology merely enables the extraction of natural resources across magnitudes, without actually creating any resources. Given its enormous energy consumption, I strongl…

> Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste

Counterpoint: nurses.

Re: AI is different

#389

Post by howtofly »

diggan wrote: post #384
howtofly wrote: post #382

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste (resulting from consumption). Human technology merely enables the extraction of natural resources across magnitudes, without actually creating any resources. Given its enormous energy consumption, I strongl…

> Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste What a sad way of viewing huge fields of creative expressions. Surely, a person sitting on a chair in a room improvising a song with a guitar is producing something not considered "waste"?

It's all about human technology, which enables massive resource consumption.

I should really say humans never truly produce anything in the realm of technology industry.

Re: AI is different

#390

Post by djeastm »

Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #349
c0balt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots That is maybe a bubble around the internet. Ime most programmers in my environment rarely use and certainly aren't dependent on it. They do also not only do code monkey-esque web programming so maybe this is sampling bias though it should be enough to refute this point.

Came here to say that. It’s important to remember how biased hacker news is in that regard. I’m just out of ten years in the safety critical market, and I can assure you that our clients are still a long way from being able to use those. I myself work in low level/runtime/compilers, and the output from AIs is often too erratic to be useful

>our clients are still a long way from being able to use those

So it's simply a matter of time

>often too erratic to be useful

So sometimes it is useful.

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