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0 pointsben_w1y ago0 comments

While I broadly agree that AI metrics have a "lies, damn lies, and statistics" problem that makes it hard to even agree how competent they are, if someone says "robotaxi" then I have no reason to expect they mean anything more nor less than "a taxi with no human driver".

I would be shocked if we're really 50 years away from that level of AI. 50 years is a long time in computing — late 70s computers were still using punched tape:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Punch_Verifica...

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aithrowawaycomm1y ago

> , if someone says "robotaxi" then I have no reason to expect they mean anything more nor less than "a taxi with no human driver".

You have three reasons:

1) reading the comment in good faith

2) understanding 'robotaxi' is not a precise technical term

3) safely assuming that most commenters here know about Waymo

There is no reason to choose the most pedantic and smarmily bad-faith reading of the comment.

As for "50 years" - I don't care about electrical engineering, I am talking about intelligence. In the 1970s we had neural networks as smart as nematodes. Today they are as smart as spiders. Maybe in 50 years they will be as smart as bees. I doubt any of our children will live to see a computer as smart as a rat.

ben_wOP1y ago

> You have three reasons:

> 1) reading the comment in good faith

> 2) understanding 'robotaxi' is not a precise technical term

> 3) safely assuming that most commenters here know about Waymo

#1 is the main reason why I wouldn't read "robotaxi" as anything other than "taxi robot", closely followed by #2.

> As for "50 years" - I don't care about electrical engineering, I am talking about intelligence.

Neither was I, and you should take #1 as advice for yourself.

> In the 1970s we had neural networks as smart as nematodes. Today they are as smart as spiders. Maybe in 50 years they will be as smart as bees. I doubt any of our children will live to see a computer as smart as a rat.

You're either overestimating the ones in the 70s or underestimating the ones today. By parameter count, GPT-3 is already about as complex as a medium sized rodent. If today's models aren't that smart (definitions of "intelligence" are surprisingly fluid from one person to the next), then you can't reasonably call the ones in the 70s as smart as a nematode either.

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