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?
#2Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#3I have only access to the pre-paywall excerpt, but what I can read does not endear me to pay for more.
> This understanding, of “object permanence”, is a normal developmental milestone, as well as a basic tenet of reality. It is also something that self-driving cars do not have.
That is just simply false. Nearly every team we heard technical details from has a “tracking subsystem” which integrates observations across time and sensor modalities. You cannot do that without object permanence.
How good is their object permanence? That is up for debate. Maybe there are situations particular versions from particular companies fail at. But then you should talk about these observed failures.
After all just because a healthy adult flunks a shell game we won’t conclude that they must lack object permanence.
Also how arogant it is from the writer to assume that out of the thousands and thousands of self-driving car engineers across many companies none of them thought that object permanance could be a trick worth implementing? What kind of ego one needs to write down a sweeping statement like that?
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#4https://archive.is/Mne8h
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.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#5I have only access to the pre-paywall excerpt, but what I can read does not endear me to pay for more. > This understanding, of “object permanence”, is a normal developmental milestone, as well as a basic tenet of reality. It is also something that self-driving cars do not have. That is just simply false. Nearly every team we heard technical details from has a “tracking subsystem” which integrates observations across…
It was even deeply discussed on Tesla's AI day 3 weeks ago.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#6[deleted]
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#7I have only access to the pre-paywall excerpt, but what I can read does not endear me to pay for more. > This understanding, of “object permanence”, is a normal developmental milestone, as well as a basic tenet of reality. It is also something that self-driving cars do not have. That is just simply false. Nearly every team we heard technical details from has a “tracking subsystem” which integrates observations across…
> Nearly every team we heard technical details from has a “tracking subsystem” which integrates observations across time and sensor modalities.
That’s not object permanence, that’s tracking the same object across multiple frames and tracking it as a single object. The below is part of the abstract for a paper “Learning to Track with Object Permanence” released this year that describes the difference between current tracking and the concept of object permenance:
> Tracking by detection, the dominant approach for on- line multi-object tracking, alternates between localization and re-identification steps. As a result, it strongly depends on the quality of instantaneous observations, often failing when objects are not fully visible. In contrast, tracking in humans is underlined by the notion of object permanence: once an object is recognized, we are aware of its physical existence and can approximately localize it even under full occlusions.
Not sure if Tesla has it or not, but there is a difference between object permenance and tracking objects across frames.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#8No, 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? Nonsensical questions. There is no such thing as a universal quality of intelligence.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#9What a stupid headline. Talk about comparing apples and oranges... But this is normal now. Since the Google car, the media is forcing the self-driving car narrative down its readers throats.
There is another similar topic which is dear to my heart. Implants that make the blind see again. I feel article about these, and self-driving car, read similarily stupid.
Re: Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?
#10I 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 roads seems to be the fact that anything or anyone can suddenly appear on the road in front of the car. It can be a drunk person, a slow animal (or a fast one), it can be a huge but empty cardboard box, or it can be a fridge in cardboard packaging left on the road for whatever stupid reason. The possibilities are almost literally infinite. A good FSD system should be able to assess, try to make a good prediction of the behavior (it's kind of OK to hit an empty box if I don't want to cause much discomfort to my passengers, but not OK to hit a fridge).
Hence in my opinion ML-based FSD is a dead end, always has been from the beginning. If you asked me 10 years ago I'd have told you the whole effort and billions of investments are going to get us some improved hardware at best but never a true universal self-driving system. The self-confidence of Google's executives, Tesla's and others' who repeatedly made predictions about this technology in the past decade is just astonishing. I've been thinking to myself all this time: how can they not see it? Really, where is this enthusiasm around ML coming from?