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by UnoriginalGuy 3289 days ago
Humans have the computation equivalent of 38 petaflops of processing power. Does a Tesla vehicle?

If you seriously want to play the inane game of "well if a human doesn't have it then a Tesla doesn't need it" then let's play that game and talk about the things humans have that the Tesla lacks.

What's interesting about human's vision system is that the human eyeball is, relatively speaking, poor. We have digital cameras far better than that already. It is what the human brain that does with that raw data which makes us, as a species, thrive. Most of what we believe we "see" we never actually see, our brain fills in the gaps dynamically and infers information over time.

So this human processing ability, much of it automated rather than conscious, is totally relevant if you want to have this "Tesla Vs. human" debate. It is also why Lidar might be needed to make up the massive shortfall in a Tesla's processing ability relative to the human brain.

But hey, you want to keep to the "but HUMANS don't need it" then I ask where is my 38 petaflops and 1 TB of memory...

3 comments

You don't need 38 petaflops to drive a car. We are wasting our minds driving. Driving doesn't need creativity, it needs the 360 degrees of awareness without any lapse in concentration and the ability to react in milliseconds.
I would peg the human brain at closer to 1 flop. That's about how many floating point operations I can do in a second, and only very simple ones.
You do more than that when calculating the trajectory of a ball thrown that you have to catch. Just not with numbers.
Humans also lose focus, fall asleep and get tired.

Teslas have multiple radars for judging distance and multiple cameras that are used for stereo disparity. Also human 38 teraflops is not the same as nvidia teraflops.

I am not saying teslas are better than humans, I'm just saying teslas can drive on I5 highway from Vancouver to Mexico better than I can.

Also Lidars are really really expensive, I applaud Tesla and commaai for breaking major ground just with cameras. Convolutional neural nets have being doing phenomenal things in the past few years.

I'm curious where you get the number "38 petaflops" from.
IBM researchers: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/computers-hav...

You can find other figures, but many are in the petaflop range, well above what could be realistically installed in a vehicle.

How about 60 bits/s:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/415041/new-measure-of-hum... I don't think we know enough about how the human brain works yet to give a precise value, but just on caloric arguments I would say that the mean processing power of the brain is not significantly above what we have now in general purpose computing devices.

In the same sense that your dog solves differential equations when he catches a Frisbee, I suppose.
It's memory + control driven with visual feedback, not much more. You don't have to solve anything if you already sorta know the solution, and can adjust it for the goal.