[ryandvm]

Bingo. This is the difference between "intelligence" and "artificial intelligence". AI as we know it today is pattern recognition. There is no ability to form even the most basic of concepts. They may have incredible sensors, but these driverless cars hardly have the intelligence of a dragonfly.

[perfmode]

I challenge you to prove that you are capable of more than recognizing patterns.

[ryandvm]

Okay, for the sake of argument let's suppose that I was clever enough to come up with the famous Grandfather Paradox of time travel. Certainly no one has observed such an event before - or anything like it. I would posit that it takes more than pattern recognition to build the necessary mental concepts to design, much less understand, such a thought experiment.

In fairness, I will concede that pattern recognition is crucial to intelligence. I would clarify my earlier position by saying that pattern recognition alone can only get you so far. Intelligence is the process of taking data, recognizing patterns, constructing multi-layered concepts and models from those patterns, and then being able to simulate and extrapolate potential outcomes based on varying inputs.

The inability of modern AI to build complex concepts from they patterns they observe is why I know to slow down my car on a Halloween night in a residential neighborhood and a self-driving Uber doesn't.

[perfmode]

Your Halloween example is you recognizing patterns:

- on Halloween there are more children on the road than usual - children are more likely to disobey traffic laws

It’s quite possible that waymo cars are already capable of this.