What would an autonomous car do?

[Note: this post gets updated every once in a while with new pictures]

This is mostly a fun post, though I hope it may trigger some thinking. Since there is much hype about self driving cars, I decided to express myself artistically and draw a bunch of situations that the current technology most likely would not be able to deal with. Some of them might be funny, some might be dangerous. Answer yourself if you want to be driven by an entity which cannot understand these situations and if you are developing a self driving car, let me know in the comments if such situations could indeed be misinterpreted. I'll start with just a few, it takes time to draw them and I'm not a very good artist. Email me if you have ideas for additional situations.

 

 

Artwork 1: Open manhole. Unlike with a regular pothole, driving into open manhole can lead to a disaster. Would a driverless car figure that out? If you consider an open manhole without construction cones an unlikely possibility, take a look at this video.

 

Artwork 2: Stop sign prank. Somebody (bored teenagers?) put tens of stop Read more...

Outside the box

This post could be considered a continuation of my previous post, "AI and the ludic fallacy."  Bear with me, as this post will make some important yet philosophical points. There are many people who cringe when they hear the p-word –  I have been known to be such a person myself. As with many fields out there, there is a lot of low quality material (namely BS) in philosophy.  However, I have also seen many incredibly insightful philosophy pieces, and it seems to be a helpful discipline whenever one needs to get out of the "box".

This post is about one such box.

An Example Box (as seen from another Box)

A brief digression from AI to illustrate where we're going.  Many successful disciplines such as math and logic operate within a carefully designed box — a set of axioms from which truths are derived. Once a decent set of axioms is established, very elegant and exciting theories can be built. Some of these theories may be successful in modeling physical reality:  classical math built on set theory is so successful that after working within it, one may be tempted to think that reality is the set theory … Read more...