Month: October 2016

Self driving mirage

Posted by Filip Piekniewski

 

Everybody is trying to build a self driving car today. Google has been testing their solution for the past ten years or so, Tesla just announced they'd be putting the "self driving hardware" onto their newly manufactured cars, Uber has a big effort with Volvo in Pittsburgh, comma.ai is trying to ship a box for outfitting certain cars with a self driving mode etc. Obviously the car manufacturers are following with Ford making announcements recently, BMW working silently and so on and so on. Some of these efforts are explicitly cautious on what they promise (driver assist technology rather than full autonomy such as e.g. Toyota), but many voices, particularly the VC's from the Bay area are hyperactive announcing how the life will be great and how the self driving car (in the sense of full autonomy) is a done deal.

Well I would not be a sceptic if I did not put all those hyper-optimistic statements to doubt. Let me go through a few claims about self driving cars one by one and put my sceptical comment next to each statement. To be frank: I'm not against the technology, I'm against the hype.

  1. Self driving cars will be
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What if we had a warp drive?

Posted by Filip Piekniewski

Here is something completely different. Nothing today about AI or deep learning.

I'm a big fan of Star Trek and generally like the utopian version of the future that Gene Roddenberry had given us. But obviously this is just a vision and a TV show, so it's full of stuff that makes people watch it. Inspired by that vision though, I've been day dreaming what it would be like if we actually had the 24'th century technology.

This will just be daydreaming exercise, so let us not bother for now on whether faster than light travel is feasible. Clearly with our current understanding of physics it does seem like a very fundamental limitation. But there is some new physics lurking, perhaps looking crazy, but quantum mechanics did look crazy in the beginning (and it still does) and yet has proven to be extremely good at describing nature.

Here are my assumptions:

  • faster than light travel is possible at a rate of say 1 light year per hour. For now let's just assume that the "warp" drive takes the ship into a thin wormhole like tube, so when the ship is in warp mode it cannot interact with matter and
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The Elephant in the Chinese room

Posted by Filip Piekniewski

There is an ancient argument in the field of AI called the Chinese room experiment. The thought experiment proposed by John Searle in the early eighties goes as follows:

  1. You put somebody who does not know Chinese in a room
  2. You give them a lengthy instruction (a program) on how to respond to given Chinese symbols
  3. Finally you run the experiment by feeding in Chinese sentences in the input and getting sentences at the output. The Chinese fellows are convinced they are running a conversation with a sentient being but the poor guy inside just shuffles symbols and has no idea what is he conversing about

The conclusion is that even though the external observers assume (by Turing test) that they are observing intelligence, the guy inside is clearly unaware of what is going on, and therefore the intelligence is somehow unreal.

Personally I have several issues with that experiment. First of all it is a thought experiment and it assumes we can have externally recognised intelligence implemented by a guy with a book of symbol transformations. Although a computational in/out relation like that should be implementable by a "computer", the size of the necessary derivations could be enormous. In … Read more...