Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

all that stuff is mostly smoke and mirrors that the VC community is mysteriously (well not that mysteriously, they're idiots) buying into

non of these concierge type startups in w'ell-turk-it-for-now-and-use-that-to-train-machine-learning-in-parallel are making any progress whatsover on the training, afaict.

if any companies get anywhere it will be because of structural advantages in training data access, i.e. it will be google or facebook or whoever.

but if you can exit one of those chatbot/turk nonsense startups in the next year or two before the penny drops, good for you.

in the meantime of course the turkers are treated like garbage, but they're organizing (cc hoos) http://wiki.wearedynamo.org/index.php/Guidelines_for_Academic_Requesters

eye manipulation needs a lot of improvement

there are a lot more muscles that move when we move our eyes

fwiw that is very significantly better than what's gone before, but the point of that study is to demonstrate a method that involves knowing nothing about physiology. there are no hard-coded heuristics about how the human body works in there. it's all learned by a machine from examples.

i didnt read the documentation and just scanned the text

thats pretty cool

i guess correcting googly eyes on photos in post-shots could yield interesting results

When I was a tech writer I remember a colleague of mine (who knew I dabbled in writing chatbots) asked me what I thought about AI and I remarked offhand that I was convinced that most of the intelligence was embedded in the data structures.

I still think this remark has validity and that neural networks and machine learning are mainly about giving machines the ability to evolve and refine their own data structures. If the newer structure fits the given task better than the unevolved structure, then the machine has gained in intelligence. Of course, real AI researchers are creating applications several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than my poor little chatbots were and could talk rings around me on this subject.

yeah it's interesting that "AI" in the sense that it's discussed in, e.g. the norvig book, has been pretty much abandoned, or at least has a much diminished profile.

this is to the extent that "AI" has almost become one of those magic phrases (like "big data") whose use allows you to quickly spot people in the tech industry who don't know what they're talking about

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/why-ai-consolidation-will-create-the-worst-monopoly-in-us-history/

Interesting topic, but: "monopoly" usage fail; and the idea that "Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft" owning everything in IT is bad for the rest of us is, hmm, how do you say, not news

yeah. i think the article doesn't do a good job of explaining why a concentration of "AI" (which for now means machine learning) power would be different from previous examples. i think it would though.

Can't wait for SAP and Oracle to buy AI

There's a scenario where a DeepMind-style AI takes over *every industry* but so far there are vast swathes of business where Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc have no presence besides search engines and mobile phones. Small/medium/large AI companies can and do thrive without heading towards an inevitable acquisition. Finance is one example - quant trading is basically ML.

I want to teach a robot LEAN manufacturing principles and really let em rip

xp also there is a ton of AI value in proprietary (and in some cases pre-internet) data

Personally I'm waiting for expert systems to really take off

Also the whole article completely fails to mention Watson or IBM which continue to plague my browsing with their ads for cognitive this and that

re: watson https://twitter.com/minethatdata/status/559177526740652035

I tried reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence the other week and it was like reading an academic paper composed in the style of an instruction manual. I'm glad I read the New Yorker article on him and AI months ago, otherwise I wouldn't have even been able to make it as far as I did!

yeah i've picked at it a bit over the last few months and it's slow going

It's not quite a monopoly if five different companies are competing...

AI/ML seems like a perfect storm of all the things that existing IP law can't deal with. Decades-long shitstorm of lawsuits on the horizon.

I interviewed for a job at a start-up the other day, and at some point one of the co-founders asked me if I "believe in machine learning." I correctly inferred that he wanted me to answer enthusiastically in the affirmative, so I resisted trotting out my usual dinner party line, that most of the cutting-edge shit that gets discovered by computer scientists ends up being shown to be equivalent to boring old statistics.

i have had that question

In a conference call with reporters, the head of Tesla, Elon Musk, said he believed the upgrades would have prevented the accident on May 7.

“These things cannot be said with absolute certainty, but we believe it is very likely that, yes, it would have,” he said. The new version of Autopilot, with its improved radar, “would see a large metal object across the road” and be able to determine that the object is not an overpass or overhead road sign that poses no threat, he said. “Impact probability would be assessed as high and it would probably brake.”

One major change is that improved radar becomes Autopilot’s main system for scanning the road. Once the update is made, Autopilot will use images from cameras to supplement the radar system. The current system uses cameras as its primary source of images, and relies on radar to help confirm what the cameras see.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/business/elon-musk-says-pending-tesla-updates-could-have-prevented-fatal-crash.html

"probably". lol

horseshoes, hand grenades and self driving cars

i'm giving a talk to a hedge fund about recurrent neural networks tomorrow :-(

sounds like a good working definition of hell

so....why were they not using cameras in the first place?

this seems like a bad idea:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-some-safety-experts-ubers-self-driving-taxi-test-isnt-something-to-hail/2016/09/11/375f980a-769a-11e6-be4f-3f42f2e5a49e_story.html

good luck Pittsburgh

my local university's engineering dept has a self-driving car project which they've been working on for a while now, since before I heard of any others iirc (or maybe about the same time as I first heard of Google's)

I've seen it a couple of times, going forwards and backwards in a straight line in an empty car park, and then stopping while people with clipboards take lots of notes

if the competition is way ahead of where they are I feel sorry for them, getting in early but just not moving fast enough

if the competition is not way ahead of where they are I feel sorry for humanity that a whole bunch of companies are now going "sure fine, just put 'em on the roads already". good luck everyone

i think the public reaction to the tesla death not making a bunch of people cancel their pre-orders or demolish stock price has provoked a better to ask forgiveness than beg permission attitude. First time one of these things go onto a sidewalk and wipe out a kindergarten class, I expect congressional hearings and a 10 year pause in development.

traditional automakers have spent a lot of time trying to determine the best way to market smart safety features to consumers as things that help you avoid accidents and keep you safer if something dangerous happens. it's a balancing act between telling people that driving is an inherently dangerous act (which people do not want to hear or acknowledge) and introducing things in ways that make them seem relatively natural and not disruptive to normal driving

tesla hasn't necessarily marketed their vehicles this way, but the general direction of press is "this thing practically drives itself, but sometimes you have to take control" which has resulted in some knuckleheads letting the car do most of the work, and when they need to take action, they're not paying attention. the self-driving tech is good, but... not that good

I believe it was Ford that was tackling this a few years back with the crash avoidance braking. They had prototypes that would work with cruise control on the freeway -- you'd set the speed you wanted, and if it saw you were approaching a slower-moving or stopped vehicle it would brake. They also had the ability to accelerate and maintain a safe distance, up to the speed you had set. They left out the second part because they found it removed too much of the driver's attention from their task.

I'm simultaneously astounded at how good the cars already are, while thinking there's no way I'm getting in one. But then I already don't drive because I'm shit at it and know I'm a danger to myself and others, so I may be an outlier here.

you're one of the good ones

more bad news for the quixotic quest to make self-driving cars - oh wait

NYT: U.S. Signals Backing for Self-Driving Cars

WASHINGTON — Federal auto safety regulators on Monday made it official: They are betting the nation’s highways will be safer with more cars driven by machines and not people.

In long-awaited guidelines for the booming industry of automated vehicles, the Obama administration promised strong safety oversight, but sent a clear signal to automakers that the door was wide open for driverless cars.

“We envision in the future, you can take your hands off the wheel, and your commute becomes restful or productive instead of frustrating and exhausting,” said Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council, adding that highly automated vehicles “will save time, money and lives.”

The statements were the most aggressive signal yet by federal regulators that they see automated car technology as a win for auto safety. Yet having officially endorsed the fast-evolving technology, regulators must now balance the commercial interests of companies including Tesla, Google and Uber with concerns over public safety, especially in light of recent crashes involving semiautonomous cars.

The policies unveiled on Monday were designed to walk that line. In a joint appearance, Mr. Zients and Anthony Foxx, secretary of the United States Department of Transportation, released the first guidelines, which outlined safety expectations and encouraged uniform rules for the nascent technology. The instructions signaled to motorists that automated vehicles would not be a Wild West where companies can try anything without oversight, but were also vague enough that automakers and technology companies would not fear overregulation.

The new guidelines on Monday, which stopped short of official regulations, targeted four main areas. The Department of Transportation announced a 15-point safety standard for the design and development of autonomous vehicles; called for states to come up with uniform policies applying todriverless cars; clarified how current regulations can be applied to driverless cars; and opened the door for new regulations on the technology.

there seem to be a lot of knee-jerk negative reactions to even the idea of self-driving vehicles around here. in a sense i understand because for the most part i view the thought of advancing AI with helplessness and a bit of dread. i think they'll end up taking a lot of jobs, and i'm not confident in the ability of lawmakers to respond with appropriate policies to help the people who will be fucked.

but self-driving cars? you can argue about whether or not they're possible in the short-term (the smart money seems to be that they are), but i don't understand rooting against the entire idea. around 1/3 of americans know someone that either died or were severely injured in a car crash. it would be really, really great to eliminate a significant amount of those 30-40K deaths per year in the U.S. alone. yes, there will still be incidents where something goes wrong and the tech can't recognize it, and it will lead to an epic lawsuit. but goddamn i'll take that any day to get old friends back, and i think most other people would too. i'm rooting for the tech, the sooner the better.

I'm not sure there is much "rooting against the entire idea" of self-driving cars going on here, so much as a certain skepticism that self-driving cars can cope well with the current chaotic hazards caused by the multitudes of human-driven cars that would constitute the crazy environment that AI cars would have to flourish within: tailgaters, speeders, distracted drivers, drivers crossing the center line, poorly maintained vehicles, road debris -- the gamut of lurking dangers that challenge all us human drivers -- and we humans at least have highly integrated psycho-motor skills to assist us in discriminating between a paper bag blowing across the road and a chunk of tire tread that just flew off a truck.

but even in that example, the drawback of AI would be that the car would react by slowing down in both situations (errantly, in the bag). also, when i think about automated cars, i don't think about the pilot/early days, where 1 out of 10 (or 100, or 1000) cars on the road are automated, but instead the vision of a road populated almost entirely with automated cars. in that version, the automobiles are all synced up and communicate with each other; one may errantly get freaked out by a low-flying bird swooping across a highway and slow down, but the only negative is that the closest car slows down and the cars behind it automatically slow down in response. that seems ok to me. i can deal with that. there are also examples like the tesla incident with the white truck crossing the road, but if most of the cars were automated, the truck wouldn't have crossed the road in the first place, right? i suppose that idea could sound ludicrous, but...it doesn't seem far away to me. at all. i don't expect that any kid i might have would ever drive.

the drawbacks to me have more do with a certain loss of a kind of freedom of movement and exploration. the american obsession with the car has caused a lot of harm, but i can't deny that when i was a teenager that was nothing better in the entire world than just driving around the backcountry with friends, and there's this certain feeling you get when you're driving late at night with the perfect song - it's cheesy but i think people understand what i mean. that feeling and freedom is hard to describe but it's real. at the same time, though, most people don't have a car (i haven't since 2006) and they survive.

around 30% of driving fatalities involve drunk drivers (2013 data). if nothing else, i'm pretty sure the wide adoption of automated cars would greatly reduce that number. occasionally there might be a well-publicized incident where something goes chaotically wrong, but that happens on a daily basis in real life, with manually driven cars.

i need to digest your posts more fully but car autopilot is the only part of the future i'm excited about

goole, do you need a hug

i might yeah, but i meant "the future" like pew pew lasers and stuff

why would anybody make stinky lasers?

no that's le pew lasers

“The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.” ― Ayn Rand.

le Pew/Rand slash, it's gotta be out there

iirc Rand's main enemies were the gradual introduction of amphetamine criminalization and her romantic partners discovering "polygamy for me, none for you" was not optimal

you can argue about whether or not they're possible in the short-term (the smart money seems to be that they are), but i don't understand rooting against the entire idea.

I don’t think anybody is “rooting against the entire idea.” We’re skeptical that we’ll see anything resembling a self-driving car in the short-term.

And smart money? We’re talking about Tesla who licenses their extremely limited technology (and is being sued by the licensee for improper use) and the bro who cracked the original iPhone. Nobody else is shipping anything.

in that version, the automobiles are all synced up and communicate with each other; one may errantly get freaked out by a low-flying bird swooping across a highway and slow down, but the only negative is that the closest car slows down and the cars behind it automatically slow down in response.

I love you. But I think you’re over-estimating our ability to engineer.

still kind of convinced that apple has seen how lucrative owning the patents or critical parts of a supply chain can be when it comes to bringing products to market and they don't want to build cars -- they just want to be the supplier of components and technologies that everyone has to use to stay competitive

still kind of convinced that apple has seen how lucrative owning the patents or critical parts of a supply chain can be when it comes to bringing products to market and they don't want to build cars -- they just want to be the supplier of components and technologies that everyone has to use to stay competitive

Apple abandoned a self-driving car, they didn’t abandon their automotive work altogether.

the press claimed they were working on a full car, then claimed they abandoned said project

like idk if you were building all that shit you'd have a test bed that you could bring to market, but it doesn't mean you're making the finished product