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by CuriouslyC 883 days ago
I don't things like "full self driving" are meaningful (and probably also AGI), because in reality it isn't a binary thing, rather it's a spectrum of power based on error rate and problem space coverage. Waymo self driving works within a defined subset of the problem space, we can stick a goalpost in the sand in term of the known problem space and error rates and say that represents "full self driving" but the reality is the problem space is less bounded than we'd like to think. We might find what we think of as full self driving and AGI turn out to be highly detailed facades when new areas of problem space are explored.

For example, imagine a full self driving car trying to get out of a city that's flooding due to heavy rains, while having to compete with people fleeing to higher ground on foot. People can generalize that way but FSD is gonna take a shit, and if you don't know how to drive in that situation so are you.

6 comments

> Waymo self driving works within a defined subset of the problem space

"works" includes a failure mode of "alert a human and ask them to take over."

> when new areas of problem space are explored.

The problem space is that the "rules of the road" are both legal, technical and social. All of which have internal conflicts as well as conflicts among each other. Anyone who has driven in severe weather has realized this in one way or another.

> For example, imagine a full self driving car trying to get out of a city that's flooding due to heavy rains, while having to compete with people fleeing to higher ground on foot.

Why do I find this easier to imagine in the fictional setting of Elysium than on the real Earth?

> People can generalize that way

People can't do that either. Some years ago there was a massive snowfall in Rome, where it seldom snows ever, people don't generally carry snow chains, and there's few snowplows and such.

Many people reacted by abandoning their cars in the middle of the road, which is basically what I'd expect any FSD vehicle to do.

That's a great point! In aviation we could easily call major jet liners "full self flying" if they wanted to market them as such but we still require TWO highly trained technicians in the piolets seats at all times!
The very beginning of the article discusses what "full self driving" means and also points out how important it is to define terms. I'm not sure your comment is a fair response to this particular article.
The issue with FSD systems as they are implemented today is that they aren't AI as much as just complex control algorithms. You can only go so far with mapping sequences of world snapshots to control actions.

I do think that once we start to investigate ML/AI structure in the direction of figuring out the correct solution rather than trying to just find functions for control algorithms based on input->output mappings, then a lot of these problems are going to disappear.

> You can only go so far with mapping sequences of world snapshots to control actions.

Mapping some complex input state to control actions is literally the definition of driving a vehicle.

No, thats the definition of closed loop vehicle control.

Driving, at least in the way humans do it, is more then that. We have internal sim running in our head that allows us to deal with conditions that we have never seen before.

The internal state is simply part of the input. Your brain holds a finite amount of information, your sensors add a finite amount of information, your brain decides on which muscles to move in which way.
Yes, but that decision process is much more than a one way compute graph. Muscle memory for actions (like throttle, steering, brakes) is probably closer to one way compute graph. Higher level strategy planning definitely has recursion to it.
This is not true. The most advanced systems in the industry today like Waymo, Cruise, Baidu, Pony.AI, and Tesla, are all primarily AI.
There is nothing "intelligent" about these systems, they are just complex forward directional compute maps.
It's not like people can generalize either. There are lots of famous drivers who ended up dead while driving.
But in most cases they intentionally pushed the limits. It‘s not as if they suddenly misidentified a firetruck and drove straight into it.
t‘s not as if they suddenly misidentified a firetruck and drove straight into it.

No, instead their 'sensors' got distracted by some other irrelevant input so they didn't noticed it in time and drove straight into it. End result is pretty much the same.