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by tehsauce
2366 days ago
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> A self-driving car's computer takes hundreds of watts to run, uses reduced precision and custom silicon wherever possible, and does not begin to approach the navigational ability of a mouse or bird whose brain consumes less than one watt of power. I would not trust the brain of a mouse or a bird to drive me in a car. Also the self-driving car computers which take hundreds of watts to run do not take advantage of custom silicon to the greatest possible extent, because the relevant algorithms are evolving rapidly. There is probably at least an order of magnitude or two of power efficiency that can be gained with current systems if the algorithms were truly baked into the chips. |
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Mouse and bird brains have evolved to operate mouse and bird bodies, not cars, and their learning ability isn't as powerful as a primate or a human so I doubt they could learn to drive a car as well as us or our specialized self-drive computers.
But... what they do manage in terms of controlling mouse and bird bodies is vastly more sophisticated and impressive than driving a car. A mouse runs around on four independently controlled legs and can tackle a vast array of terrains while dodging or chasing moving objects. Birds can navigate in 3d space while flying with articulated flapping wings with complex control surfaces operated by dozens of muscles.
Driving a car is ridiculously easy compared to anything like that. If mouse and bird brains had evolved to control cars I'd absolutely trust them to drive me around at least as much if not more than I trust a Tesla's autopilot. Driving is a simpler problem than operating a mouse body.
Don't get me wrong: our self-drive AIs are amazing engineering achievements. I'm just pointing out the impressive performance of tiny brains using fractions of a watt of power at much more difficult tasks.
The thing that blows my mind and makes me hypothesize quantum computing or even P=NP is the power requirements of those brains. It's "impossible." I'm not suggesting that we can't figure it out, just that we haven't yet and that it's probably going to take more or different approaches than we think it will take.
Immune systems were once considered so "impossible" that it led several researchers to abandon science in frustration, but we eventually got a good understanding of what was going on (and it's impressive!). Understanding immune systems had to wait for molecular genetics and modern evolutionary learning theory among other things. I suspect that really replicating brain-like performance will have to wait for something as far beyond our current state of the art as those were in the 1920s.