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Comment by gamblor956

4 years ago

Many people feel the same way listening to Elon Musk talking about AI and self driving...

And yet every Tesla owner tells me that their car is just one update away from driving itself across the country.

Musk states that his company's intention is to advance computer vision to the point where it can safely drive a car, and then offer this technology with the sensors deployed in their current vehicle fleet.

Milton stated that using a very secure HTML5 supercomputer that's linked on the data network allows them to build their own chips.

These statements are not equivalent in what they imply about the speaker. It's not subtle.

  • Musk says a lot of silly things about areas of science and technology he knows nothing about. People who do know about those topics feel the same way about Musk as most of HN, a web-technologies focused forum, feels about Milton talking about HTML5.

It's not the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8

You can watch that talk and see the approach they're taking. Maybe you're more skeptical than they are about the near term possibility, but you can see that the work and progress is real.

The AGI risk is real too.

What Milton said doesn't make semantic sense, it's not a question of timelines.

https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

  • I firmly believe that some parts of the AI community have a vast overestimation of their capabilities.

    AGI is not 50 years away - it is unknowably far in the future. It may be a century, it may be a millenium. We just know far too little about the human mind to make any firm prediction - we're like people in Ancient Greece or 1800s England trying to predict how long it would take to develop technology to reach the moon.

    We are at the level where we can't understand how the nervous system of a worm works in terms of computation. Emulating a human-level mind is so far beyond our capabilities that it is absurd to even imagine we know how to do it, "we just need a little more time".

    • And yet most scientists would claim that there was no plausible, practical way to achieve a controlled fission reaction, with many flat-out stating it was impossible, at the same time that the first fusion reactor was ticking away in Chicago in 1942.

      I agree it's not possible to have a good idea to the answer to this question, unless you happen to be involved with a development group that is the first to figure out the critical remaining insights, but it's more in the league of "don't know if it's 5 years or 50" rather than "100 years or 1000".

      Predictions are easy when there are no consequences, but I wouldn't make a bet with serious consequences on critical developments for AGI not happening in the next decade. Low probability, probably, but based on history, not impossible.

      5 replies →

  • I don't understand why it's relevant to watch a video of someone who is not Musk as a comparison to Milton.

    I'm not claiming that the Head of AI Research at Tesla has said stupid things (I don't think he has), I'm saying that Musk has said stupid and nonsensical things that don't make semantic or scientific sense, and in comparison to Milton their hucksterism is just a difference of degrees.

    • He's the head of AI and self-driving at Tesla because Elon hired him to do exactly that and understands the approach they're taking.

      It's not a matter of degree, but one of kind.

> just one update away

What's the over/under on cold fusion before self-driving?

It used to be more fun before the search engines start pushing age over relevance, but searching for 'elon musk claims' is entertaining.

  • Self-driving first for sure, since cold fusion isn't thought to even be theoretically possible, and I think self-driving is likely to arrive sometime before "never," even if it's a long time from now. With the uptick in funding for vanilla/hot fusion, though, self-driving vs. hot fusion (Q>1) is actually a legitimately interesting question, I think. I'd probably still bet on self-driving, I guess? But I'd be less confident (and I don't think either is soon).

I got the HW3 hardware update in my MX a few weeks ago - and from what my car has demonstrated to me what it’s capable of - I sincerely believe Tesla will have driveway-to-driveway autonomy for simpler scenarios (e.g. suburbia and semi-rural areas, with clear road-markings) within two years.

I appreciate that what I just said comes with a huge caveat - and that probably 80% of the work will be hammering-down everything else - but consider that Google’s Waymo is already well-past that already.

  • If Tesla is planning to do self-driving entirely with vision systems, they are more than a decade away from a driveway-to-driveway autonomy unless you mean from your driveway to your next door neighbor's driveway, seeing as how they can't identify trucks on a highway, stalled objects on a roadway, or, per Consumer Reports, stop signs, traffic lights, or road markings on any road other than major highways and streets.

> And yet every Tesla owner tells me that their car is just one update away from driving itself across the country.

I just drove my Tesla half way across the country and back last week. And based on the performance of Autosteer and the neighboring car visualizations they're nowhere close to Level 5 self driving.

Love the car and am a big Tesla/SpaceX fanboy. But I won't believe it'll achieve Level 5 until I see it.