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More Fuel for the Self-Driving Car Fire
Just came across this article this morning. I’ll highlight one paragraph and add emphasis:
The linked report suggests that the artificial intelligence may never be “intelligent” enough to do what human beings are generally capable of doing. (Well, not all of us, of course. A couple of days driving in Florida will tell you that.) That may be true in some ways, but more than raw “intelligence,” the AI systems do not have human intuition. They aren’t as intuitive as humans in terms of trying to guess what the rest of the unpredictable humans will do at any given moment. In some of those cases, it’s not a question of the car not realizing it needs to do something, but rather making a correct guess about what specific action is required.
I’ve made this argument before, that humans are better at winging it than AI — so far.
Admiral Rickover was pretty much against using computers to run the engine room, with a couple of exceptions. Any task that was deemed too monotonous was one, the other being any task that could be performed quicker by a computer. Even so, these weren’t really computers in the AI sense, but rather electronic sensors with programming to handle the task at hand. I’m sure modern submarine engine rooms have more computerization nowadays, but I’ll bet the crew can easily take over if the machines fail . . .
Published in Technology
Yes indeed, I’m one of those customers.
Yes, these operate on the speed differential, you are traveling at 25, the car that is well in front is slowing to near 0, that triggers it. Happens in my truck on occasion and scares the pudding out of me. The alarm is more likely to cause me to crash that the situation that triggered it.
I cant imagine living any other way.
I was giving an example of folly.
Oh, that would be super-duper!
Sam Harris probably considered himself a candidate for that panel of genius ethicists.
Recently he publicly opined that Joe Biden is undoubtedly corrupt, that there was a conspiracy to deny the public knowledge of this corruption, but that even if there were stacks of children’s corpses (yes, that’s the phrase he used) in Ol’ Joe’s cellar, Biden would still be preferable to Trump.
Pressed for evidence that Trump was worse than Kid-Corpse Brandon, the best Harris could come up with was Trump University.
Whenever I travel, I see plenty of long-haul trucks on the road. There are still locations without train access, so trucks will be around a long time.
It also has to do with speed of delivery.
Truck: Leaves source, drives to destination.
Train: Load container. Wait for pickup, or drive container to railyard. Route container/railcar to final rail destination (which may involve interim switching/train routing). Unload container and put on truck for delivery to destination.
Sam must be itching for a forensic audit of the Clinton Foundation, then.
I think that there will be an option, absent some strange market failure. If drivers become more scarce, their wages increase, which prompts more people to become drivers.
My oldest son is an example of this, it turns out. He became a trucker last year. He had a hiatus from his trucking work due to a couple of training sessions for the Marines (he’s a sergeant in the reserves). He got a new job, and started a new route last week. It looks like he’ll be driving a regular route from Phoenix to Philadelphia and back.
My car has adaptive cruise control (part of the 736 page manual). It is nice on open highways. When it comes to dense traffic, it is not very aggressive (leaves big openings) and when another car moves into the openings, it abruptly reacts to restore the programmed following distance. It is nice to have to stretch the legs on long trips.
Mine (Hyundai) has a button to let you choose how much following space to leave.
The current more-or-less national situation with finding restaurant and retail workers, even at very elevated wages, would tend to argue we’re seeing a very large market failure (wonder if might be related to government subsidies for not working….). I don’t know why that failure wouldn’t extend to truck drivers as well. It takes a lot more training to learn to be a truck driver than it does to work at a pizza joint.
If CA get a $22 minimum wage for fast-food workers, you’ll see much more automation in those places. The ramp-up costs for hybrid trucks on a parallel highway system or more railways will protect truck drivers for a while. Whatever your job, you can eventually price yourself out of the market.
My 93 Volvo has an excellent accident avoidance system.
Intelligence is too deep a topic for me to give casual answers, which is to say I’m not expert enough to give you a short answer that I could be certain was correct. If you want to know the difference you’ll have to do some work. You could start with Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence, an easy non-technical read, and branch out from there.
But here are a few points that ought to be safe: A real intelligence is self-directed and learns continuously. It can correct and refine its own behavior, and can function effectively in situations and environments for which it has not been trained.
Can anyone make sense of this? I’m not sure I can.
I might argue that anything done by any kind of computer, will be a simulation.
Including biological computers such as animal brains?
Haugeland and I are using the term identically. An artificial intelligence is something that looks like an intelligence but isn’t. A real intelligence is real regardless what it’s made of.
I don’t think that makes sense. If you want to argue that any electrical activity can be viewed as a simulation, then Turing already got all the mileage out of that kind of argument.
Is there a definition for “real intelligence”? If an AI is externally indistinguishable from a real intelligence, how can one insist that it is not a real intelligence?
There is probably a connection to the idea of a Turing test, a technological singularity where machines start designing smarter machines, and the question of whether a machine can become self-aware, but I’m too lazy to attempt making the connections. Besides, someone has probably already done it better than I could.
Every AI is distinguishable from real intelligence. There’s no AI operating anywhere today that can’t be easily distinguished from the lowest animal intelligence by any (intelligent) observer.
Sure there are definitions of intelligence. Mine is “the facility of prediction.” An AI can simulate a real intelligence’s ability to predict, within narrow confines for which it has been exhaustively refined and fitted.
The Turing test is pretty much irrelevant to anyone actually trying to realize a synthetic intelligence. It’s so useless I always thought Turing intended it more as an exasperated joke or a distraction for philosophers. The last step of a developing synthetic intelligence will be speech and conversation – the thing will have been intelligent long before it gets to that point.
The key word to me is “today”. It’s not as though research has stopped.
The philosophers have a thought experiment involving what they term “the philosophical zombie” that always sounded to me like a variation on the Turing test. I see at this time no valid distinction between AI and SI other than complexity and maybe some capabilities. I see the same thing in humans, yet I think all humans have intelligence.
People are working on it. There is hardware for the sort of networks they’re using, and if there’s hardware that means investment. I don’t know how far along they are. It scares me that not more is known about it.
I think the ability to learn is distinguishing.
The spacing is not aggressive enough for use in most cities. There is no way a self-driving car can be as aggressive as a driver in Boston or NYC.
In the Utopian future will self driving cars get bigger or smaller?
I find that profoundly unsatisfying. Put in slightly different words, it says “Synthetic intelligence, in contrast to artificial intelligence, isn’t artificial.”
In general use, artificial and synthetic are effectively synonyms. I’m sure we can make arbitrary restrictions on what “artificial intelligence” means and then say that “synthetic intelligence” is that but without the arbitrary restrictions. We could, for example, say that artificial intelligence excludes machine learning. Then we could say that synthetic intelligence includes machine learning. I don’t think that makes much sense, but we could do that.
Perhaps someone who has a sense of the difference between the two could simply make a list of things that an AI can not do that an SI can, or vice versa.
You’re contrasting “artificial” and “real” intelligence here. Where does “synthetic” intelligence fit in this comparison?
The impression I’m taking away — and I could be mistaken — is that the intent is to define “synthetic intelligence” as real intelligence produced through man-made processes, and “artificial intelligence” as something that falls short of real intelligence. If that’s the case, then the distinction is predicated on our ability to define attributes of real intelligence that can not be achieved via artificial intelligence. I’m skeptical that we understand either real intelligence or the limits of artificial intelligence well enough to make that distinction with any confidence.
Machines learn now, don’t they?