[Dprglist] AI in natural language, self-driving cars, etc.

[Murray Altheim]

On 10/18/22 04:50, David P. Anderson via DPRGlist wrote:
> Hi Murray,
> 
> Thanks for this thoughtful reply.   Your observations here have been my inclination for some time, as we have
> discussed before, though I haven't had much support in your absence... :)

Hi David,

I think because R&D funding (as well as angel funding) is largely tied
to peoples' beliefs in the unbelievable, the AI world has historically
been rife with claims of near-future greatness that look mostly
embarrassing in retrospect. We won't have safe self-driving cars until
there are no non-self-driving cars on the road, no bicycles, and no
pedestrians either. And no rickshaws, and no bad weather, and likely no
night time driving either. Not in our lifetimes, unless we're all okay
with a lot of people getting killed by self-driving cars. That their
safety record may be better than humans won't matter: we won't permit
our children to be killed by robots, nor should we even be asked that
question.

> I have been around long enough to see fads come and go in the AI community (remember Expert Systems?)  So who knows
> what will be in and out 10 years from now (it's always 10 years from now).  More to the point, I'm not sure a general
> AI as currently constituted is actually required for what we want robots to do.   As has been discussed, a robot as
> capable and "intelligent" as a Honey Bee would be a huge step forward from where we are now.

I'm actually of a mind that if we abandon either deep learning or the
problems inherent in creating a model of a dynamic reality so good we
can reliably reason on it, then that leaves us effectively with what
Brooks' team was pushing back in the 80s and what you've been pursuing:
the emergent intelligence from accumulating behaviours based on an
embodied machine presence. There's the possibility of heuristics and
the possibility of a dynamically evolving internal model, but even the
latter hasn't be demonstrated (though it seems to exist in nature to
an extent based on the size of the brain of the animal to some degree).
For personal robotics I think that's still a viable goal anyway.

> And once life on Earth made it up to the insects, all the pieces were in place for what followed.   Throw in a few
> peas and carrots, maybe some onion, simmer and stir for a few hundred million years, and out pops Beethoven.   We've
> still got a long way to go.

I think I may have already mentioned that one of the best books I've
read in years was one that blew away my understanding of planetary
history, The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen. Last week I read an
article that posited that Mars could have had an early waterborne
environment, and at the first emergence of sea life, effectively
destroyed its own atmosphere and died pretty much immediately (on a
geological timescale). That this didn't happen on earth was due to
some relatively minor differences in the composition of our atmosphere.

So we got lucky. Mars, not so lucky.

Cheers,

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray18 at altheim dot com>                       = =  ===
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     ===  ===
                                                                    = =  ===
     In the evening
     The rice leaves in the garden
     Rustle in the autumn wind
     That blows through my reed hut.
            -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu