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0 pointscandiodari4y ago0 comments

That's doesn't seem true. In the short term AI algorithms clearly understand why they do things. Yes, the time horizon is obviously shorter (not in games, but in the real world, sure), but the same can often be said of humans.

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.

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VRay4y ago

Hey man, if we’re rebuilding roads for the sake of self driving cars, let’s just go back to ubiquitous light rail instead, like we had before cars got popular. This whole self-driving industry is so ridiculous when you consider that this has been a solved problem for over a hundred years..

Nasrudith4y ago

The problem is rail is horrible at traffic handling and uses time multiplexing. One guilded age unethical activity was deliberately creating "traffic jams" on competitor's lines. While rail is good and could use expansion it makes a dubious complete replacement. It works wonderfully with shared routes but fails at handling the "amalgamation" part.

Even Japan still uses trucks for the last mile and they have embraced it enough to have "bullet train suburbs" around stations.

rootusrootus4y ago

> And third, the world has almost entirely been rebuilt to compensate for human observation flaws.

I don't entirely agree with what I think your point is. Fundamentally, humans are pretty great at using context to work their way through a variety of unfamiliar situations. The work we do on intersections is about tuning. Even in a bad intersection with horrible flaws, 99.9% or more of all humans navigating it will be successful. The reason we keep tuning them is because our tolerance for death is zero. 1 death for every 100M miles driven is pretty good, but many people still find it completely intolerable. We're going to keep tuning.

But I don't think that means that making roads safely navigable by algorithms is going to be a simple matter of tuning them.

candiodariOP4y ago

> Even in a bad intersection with horrible flaws, 99.9% or more of all humans navigating it will be successful.

I think you will almost universally see that everything in a human slows down a lot when dealing with unfamiliar and/or difficult situations. In driving, this easily causes damage.

When difficult enough we start relying on social behavior ("you go first and tell me how it went") to find something vaguely resembling acceptable performance, then go away and never touch it again.

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