For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore (opens in new tab)

If the explicit goal is to create a human intellect, then sure, there's a really interesting conversation there—one that is happening constantly in the DL/AI research community, in which virtually no one believes that we're close to AGI or that current deep learning is going to achieve it.

But that's explicitly not the goal that 99.9% of neural networks are designed with. Their traditional use case is where they excel: programmatically approximating functions that are exceedingly hard to approximate manually.

This includes but is not limited to image recognition, speech synthesis, recommendation (including search), fraud detection, ETA prediction, even medicinal chemistry.

If you see humans responding to animals that don't use eyes (e.g. bats, insects) fuckups are a constant. We are very bad at interacting with anything that doesn't have something similar to our eyes to observe the world.

And third, the world has almost entirely been rebuilt to compensate for human observation flaws. It's not just staircases having a step height that works well with humans, but for example highway intersections have been changed 100 times until we found one that humans respond to in a manner different from slamming into the split. The same is true for many intersections (I first started realizing this when reading an article that an intersection with a bridge was modified because 5 people died when a car crushed them against the side of the bridge. It was redesigned. Now we find that an algorithm with an entirely different set of observations makes different mistakes ... not really that strange. Perhaps we should start modifying streets algorithms misjudge).

For example the warning cones for when you have an accident or road works or the like have also been adapted many times because version X was "causing too many accidents".

So in a bunch of cases it's neither that humans don't have big observational flaws or that algorithms have many more. It's just that we largely eliminated the human ones. Not by eliminating them from humans, but by eliminating them from the world.

Same is true on the inside of buildings.

Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’ (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/06/microsoft...)

There are a lot of tasks that we humans do the same way as a machine does- repeating a set of mental and/or physical patterns until it becomes second nature to us. Those are called "habits" and those are precisely what machines are good at doing.

Intelligence is different kind of processing. It resides in the particular form of processing most often found in the mammalian brain — a processing we know intimately as conscious experience. Every human thought, word, and innovation formed within human consciousness. There’s no difference between consciousness and intelligence — they are the same.

It’s here at the “hard problem” that most (but not all) ML research turns aside to follow the “bitter lesson”, hoping that the difference between instinct and intelligence is merely one of scale.

But as OP points out, the difference is one of kind.

If everyone was flying their personal planes around and constantly banging into each other a minor software bug would not ground any planes. It would be more like a malfunctioning airbag recall.

What we need is a big fat lawsuit, since the government will not do anything to anger the only profitable US automaker.

I tried FSD on the $200/month plan and dropped it: It makes the car unsafe. To command a lane change you hold down the turn signal stalk. If you fail to hold it down long enough the car suddenly swerves back to the lane it was in. This is (to say the least) disconcerting at 80 mph.

FSD can also suddenly decide to do weird things that are difficult to correct even when you're paying close attention. It's unnerving. Ordinary autosteer (which is included with every Tesla at no extra charge) works well enough for me and it fails in more predictable ways; it's easy for me to build a mental model of its limitations. I'll stick with that.

And there have been at least two incidences that I can recall where Autopilot saved me from a wreck.

I would not choose to go back, and would buy it again without hesitation.

So... yeah it's gonna take a lot of deaths for this to get regulated. It's a shame cuz we already basically know how to regulate this.

Humans generally do not give their cars haircuts by slamming them under a stopped cargo truck. They do not generally smash straight into stationary emergency vehicles.

We can’t handwave basic safety issues away by saying “in aggregate, they perform better than humans in most conditions.” The basic safety issues get people killed. Leaning on some “average driver” fallacy is a way to ignore issues core to the tech stack.

It's not uncommon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...

This sort of statement keeps being parroted over and over again. As Linus would say, talk is cheap, show me the code; then we can speak.

>So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to time [...]

This is just insane, honestly, and if this is the premise that guides the development of these sort of systems I'll be glad to never set foot on one.

I have been driving for almost two decades with 0 accidents. I'm not saying I can't have a lapse of judgement or do something stupid going forward, but I certainly won't mis-class an object, nor kill myself over it.

I hypothetically want bad drivers to be replaced by AI because it's likely already better. But replacing everyone with AI (at the current generation of AI, which isn't the first, nor the last) will undoubtedly lead to tons of avoidable deaths, and I'm not keen on drawing a lottery ticket for it.

Ex: Imagine a week where self-driving cars have a bug that only mis-identifies grandmas. Only a few grandmas die but the perceptual impact is massive.

I believe that there have been studies showing that today's "self driving" cars are already statistically safer than regular cars.

Having to switch the mode of operation of your car depending on what side of various county lines you are on seems like an obvious regulatory failure.

Others are bring up tired, drunk, texting... All real problems, but following too close is universal to nearly all drivers.

If I can reduce the error rate by 90%, but the remaining 10% are "random" (whatever that means), is that worse than not reducing the error rate?

We don't have a good frame of reference for how machines might behave with their failures, which means that accidents could be worse than they would be otherwise.

Sounds fair enough, especially if the spammer either has to pay the costs of the review (ie. a few dollars), or is limited to being only allowed one review per month/year to prevent abuse.

Nope. I won't be part of that statistic.

in my 20s you would need to bring the reckless back in.