Fully automated vehicles - 'not in our lifetime'?

Enterprise_1701C

I have not read much of this thread. I know autonomous vehicles will arrive just as surely as internal combustion did all those years ago, debate on when and how is currently pointless until we know more.

I did however wonder how many people knew about the autonomous pods at Heathrow T5? OK, they are not driving on roads, but they are autonomous and they are right here right now.

https://londonist.com/2014/09/a-ride-on-heathrows-self-driving-pods

As far as I can tell a lot of science would not happen without science fiction. Look at Joules Verne - he practically invented the submarine. If it wasn't for shows like Star Trek and similar would we even have things like Android tabs? Our current phones are certainly smaller and more capable than their communicators.

If someone can imagine something it can happen.

AnotherJoe

Enterprise_1701C wrote: »

I did however wonder how many people knew about the autonomous pods at Heathrow T5? OK, they are not driving on roads, but they are autonomous and they are right here right now.

https://londonist.com/2014/09/a-ride-on-heathrows-self-driving-pods

The first 10% of autonomy is easy (and these pods are the first 1%). The next 10% is probably twice as hard. The next 10% probably twice as hard again. By the time you get to even 90% you are into millions of times harder and progress gets slower and slower. At the moment everyone is going for it on the basis its a solvable problem. It may not be. Or, and a different problem, it may not be solvable cost effectively. It gets more expensive as you have to throw more hardware at the problem. Its quite possibly that full AI might require far more energy than used to move the car.

Enterprise__1701C wrote: »

If someone can imagine something it can happen.

Even outside the extraordinary/impossible since we can imagine the impossible, there are economic reasons why things may not happen even if they are technically possible. 5 mile high skyscrapers or a cure for a disease that affects a handful of people for example, dont have an economic case and wont happen on account of that.

Out,_Vile_Jelly

Malthusian wrote: »

Chess is an abstract simulation of a fight. A toddler wrestling another toddler in a sandpit can work out that in a fight you want to win. So can a rat. A computer cannot, without human intervention.

I went to an entertaining talk by Gary Kasparov last year, and got a copy of his book about AI. It's an interesting read that I'd recommend if you're interested in this sort of thing ( he's still seriously bitter about being beaten by a computer though).

The other factor with driverless cars is the public appetite for them. There are decades of ritualised behaviour and attitudes to overcome concerning the rite of passage of your first car, the status symbols that expensive cars represent for some people, all those classic road trip movies where cars embody freedom, independence and adventure. Is a drone vehicle by mobile app really as thrilling?

GreatApe

Clifford_Pope wrote: »

But that's the whole point, and the vital difference between artificial intelligence and real intelligence.

All great human advances have come about because someone has contradicted the rule that others can only follow because it has been programmed into them. Someone has said "What if ...?"

A computer will never have a flash of inspiration and ignore something it has been told to work out. It will never contradict a figure it has been given. It will never ostracise itself from its network to pursue obstinately an independent line of thought, reviled by its fellow computers. It will never be proved right 100 years after it has been martyred.

The only way you can claim that is if you believe in the supernatural that humans are special because god gives us the ability to think

If you don't believe in that then it is much more reasonable to assume humans brains are not the peak of all possible intelligences that we will be surpassed.

Also what is the distinction because artificial and biological?
Are the atoms that make up your brain more or less artificial than the atoms that make up a computer?

The human brain is just a collection of atoms with this super special emergent property we call intelligence but it cannot be it definitely cannot be the only pattern of atoms that can have this emergent property. This is self evident by the fact that every single human mind is different is a different pattern of neurones and connections is a different size is a different composition yet all of them have this emergent property of intelligence.

The super intelligence that arrives might be biological this is unlikely but it is a possibility maybe a possibility you would be more willing to accept. This planet is very very old yet homo sapiens have not been here for even a million years we came from nothing to something so why do you find it so hard to believe another intelligence could not also come from nothing to being

[Deleted User]

antrobus wrote: »

A computer does not understand that 2+2=4, unless a human programs it into them.



We don't have to. They can't think for themselves, They will work out whatever we program them to work out.

Besides, if we ever get to that point, we have the three laws of robotics. Somebody's already thought that one through.:)

They can (sort of):

https://pretendingnottopanic.com/2017/06/19/computers-invent-their-own-language/

Last year Facebook had to pull the plug on some work.

There were using bots to undertaken some analysis. The bots worked out for themselves that is was more efficient to speak in a new language instead of using english and so they created a new language to use. Facebook had no idea what the bots were 'saying' and so had to stop things to make changes so that they reverted back to english.

Malthusian

antrobus wrote: »

Besides, if we ever get to that point, we have the three laws of robotics. Somebody's already thought that one through.:)

Ah, the notoriously infallible Three Laws of Robotics that failed in every single Asimov story about robots.

Saying that the Three Laws of Robotics is a great guide for AI research is like saying that Frankenstein is a great guide for constructing humans out of dead body parts. Or that we should follow Metropolis' example of how to build a modern city. It suggests you haven't read the book or seen the film.

I went to an entertaining talk by Gary Kasparov last year, and got a copy of his book about AI.

The great advancement of chess AI is that within 20 years we went from Gary Kasparov believing that the computer must be cheating because its moves were too good for a computer, to most chess.com players believing that their opponent must be cheating because their moves were too good for a human

Chess.com has developed its own anti-cheating algorithm that detects whether your moves are consistently not stupid enough to be human, and if your moves aren't sufficiently dumb you get banned. Maybe one day they'll be selling it to Formula 1, who can use it to work out whether the cars are secretly being driven by computers.

GreatApe wrote:

The human brain is just a collection of atoms with this super special emergent property we call intelligence but it cannot be it definitely cannot be the only pattern of atoms that can have this emergent property. This is self evident by the fact that every single human mind is different is a different pattern of neurones and connections is a different size is a different composition yet all of them have this emergent property of intelligence.

There is a yawning chasm between "intelligence is an emergent property and in theory we could replicate the conditions under which that property emerges, although we don't yet know what they are", and "we're going to find out what those conditions are in the next 20 years and then replicate them because something something Moore's Law".

GreatApe

Malthusian wrote: »

There is a yawning chasm between "intelligence is an emergent property and in theory we could replicate the conditions under which that property emerges, although we don't yet know what they are", and "we're going to find out what those conditions are in the next 20 years and then replicate them because something something Moore's Law".

Why do you think it might not be in this century? We still have more than 80 years remaining in this century and there is no reason to believe information technology wont continue to exponentially improve.

Herzlos

No reason beyond physics - transistors cannot be smaller than an atom.

Enterprise_1701C

Herzlos wrote: »

No reason beyond physics - transistors cannot be smaller than an atom.

Yet.

Things change at a greater rate than anyone can ever truly predict.

GreatApe

Herzlos wrote: »

No reason beyond physics - transistors cannot be smaller than an atom.

Why would transistors need to be smaller than an atom for intelligence to emerge?