Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?

I think it should be obvious to most of us that intelligence is a combination of statistical learning, tree search, and the kind of generalized knowledge about the physical world the article is talking about. I don&#x27;t believe any of the three components alone can excel at any meaningful or interesting task. ML can play go, but can&#x27;t fold clothes, isn&#x27;t it absurd?<p>Going back to self-driving, the main challenge on the roads seems to be the fact that anything or anyone can suddenly appear on the road in front of the car. It can be a drunk person, a slow animal (or a fast one), it can be a huge but empty cardboard box, or it can be a fridge in cardboard packaging left on the road for whatever stupid reason. The possibilities are almost literally infinite. A good FSD system should be able to assess, try to make a good prediction of the behavior (it&#x27;s kind of OK to hit an empty box if I don&#x27;t want to cause much discomfort to my passengers, but not OK to hit a fridge).<p>Hence in my opinion ML-based FSD is a dead end, always has been from the beginning. If you asked me 10 years ago I&#x27;d have told you the whole effort and billions of investments are going to get us some improved hardware at best but never a true universal self-driving system. The self-confidence of Google&#x27;s executives, Tesla&#x27;s and others&#x27; who repeatedly made predictions about this technology in the past decade is just astonishing. I&#x27;ve been thinking to myself all this time: <i>how can they not see it?</i> Really, where is this enthusiasm around ML coming from?

The main challenge for fsd tech is they do not have the tech that a human naturally has, anticipation, hearing, interpretation, all integrated into vision, we see good at dusk, daylight, dawn, night to a degree, we know how to deal with rain and snow and ice. In other words, humans don&#x27;t need a human fallback system like the self driving systems do.<p>The thing that self driving systems can do, lane keeping and stop and go traffic in a straight line could be done by a human Hild within a few hours of training, less if it&#x27;s an auto gear box.<p>The fsd software is plain infantile compared to a human driver, it might keep a lane better than a human who does not have any business driving a car in the first place(blind, on drugs, sleepy , alcohol).<p>In the beginning, cars didn&#x27;t have good brakes or suspensions and that led to accidents as well, but once cars where road safe, it didn&#x27;t take humans long to accumulate the driving skills. In Europe, people get a driver&#x27;s licence after 12-30 observed hours of driving practice and a theory test and are deemed road worthy, it works more or less. Fsd tech is now 10years old with God knows how many dev hours and collected data behind it and no hope for full fsd on the horizon anytime soon.<p>It&#x27;s quite simple, if machines were better, they would have replaced humans, but the human brain and body is quite far more sophisticated than any of these fsd systems. Sure, for some tasks, machines are better suited and the change has happened.<p>Call me authoritarian or whatever, I would prohibit the sale of these systems for the time being. If the companies want to raise money for it, do it, don&#x27;t charge the buyers upfront. And most importantly, don&#x27;t release your beta ware to the streets where my kids are walking or are in another car. I didn&#x27;t sign up for this last time I checked. The regulatory bodies are suspiciously quiet on the matter(slow is normal). A whitelist approach should be deployed, hell, in most of Europe, if you change as much as an exhaust system or use tinted windows, or different wheels, it&#x27;s illegal unless there are homologation papers.

That&#x27;s the reason why I think that Tesla&#x27;s approach to self driving is a dead end.<p>They are trying to copy the way humans drive, using vision and pattern recognition, but without real, high level intelligence behind it. The problem described in the article is just one aspect of it: a human will know that a bicycle is hidden behind the van, and he know how bicycles tend to behave and be ready when it pops out. An AI, most likely not, it means the reasoning of &quot;if humans don&#x27;t need X to drive, then neither does a self-riving car&quot; is flawed, X can be lidar, annotated maps, machine-to-machine communication, etc....<p>I personally think that self-driving cars need every help they can get in order to make up for their lack of intelligence. They already have 100% awareness and superhuman reflexes, but if they can get things like extra sensors, that&#x27;s even better. It may not get the bicycle behind the van, but it can somewhat compensate by catching it a fraction of a second earlier as it pops out, or maybe by knowing though prerecorded maps that it is a place where bikes are expected.

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No, and the constant desire to apply the same scale of intelligence to dramatically different things is absolutely nonsense. A self-driving car does not need to understand the world in a way a human does, nor can it actually do so. It needs to understand the world in a way that enables it to successfully complete its assigned tasks. Full stop.<p>Is an orange as smart as a screwdriver? Is an ant as smart as a waterfall? Nonsensical questions. There is no such thing as a universal quality of <i>intelligence.</i>

&quot;BY THE AGE of seven months, most children have learned that objects still exist even when they are out of sight ... It is also something that self-driving cars do not have. And that is a problem. Autonomous vehicles are getting better, but they still don’t understand the world in the way that a human being does. For a self-driving car, a bicycle that is momentarily hidden by a passing van is a bicycle that has ceased to exist.&quot;<p>Where is this assertion coming from? Self driving requires planning which requires forward prediction and continuous object tracking, I highly doubt this is at all true.<p>&quot;Modern AI is based on the idea of machine learning.&quot;<p>sigh..... while it&#x27;s true a lot of the most ground-breaking advancements in AI over the past decade has been due to ML, it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s the only set of techniques that are worked on as part of AI. For instance, self driving is a case in which many techniques that are used (planning, sensor fusion, filtering, etc.) are not ML-based.

I hope it is. I wouldn&#x27;t trust a seven-month-old to drive my car.

Having literally just yesterday ridden in a bumper car driven by my 5 year old, I can safely say I&#x27;d rather let my Tesla drive. And I don&#x27;t even have the full Self Driving beta, I just have &quot;enhanced autopilot&quot;<p>There is more to self-driving than &quot;Object Permanence&quot;, it&#x27;s a bit of a false equivalency. My 5 year old can recognize letters &#x2F; ABCs better than car... still wouldn&#x27;t want her to drive.<p>Is FSD perfect? Absolutely not. I know some people who use it don&#x27;t see it this way but I see it more as augmenting my driving than replacing me. For now, at least. But a 7 month old would have a negative impact on my driving.

A dog is smarter than a 7-month old. Maybe dogs could drive cars after all.

No

I have only access to the pre-paywall excerpt, but what I can read does not endear me to pay for more.<p>&gt; This understanding, of “object permanence”, is a normal developmental milestone, as well as a basic tenet of reality. It is also something that self-driving cars do not have.<p>That is just simply false. Nearly every team we heard technical details from has a “tracking subsystem” which integrates observations across time and sensor modalities. You cannot do that without object permanence.<p>How good is their object permanence? That is up for debate. Maybe there are situations particular versions from particular companies fail at. But then you should talk about these observed failures.<p>After all just because a healthy adult flunks a shell game we won’t conclude that they must lack object permanence.<p>Also how arogant it is from the writer to assume that out of the thousands and thousands of self-driving car engineers across many companies none of them thought that object permanance could be a trick worth implementing? What kind of ego one needs to write down a sweeping statement like that?

What a stupid headline. Talk about comparing apples and oranges... But this is normal now. Since the Google car, the media is forcing the self-driving car narrative down its readers throats.<p>There is another similar topic which is dear to my heart. Implants that make the blind see again. I feel article about these, and self-driving car, read similarily stupid.