alt Hacker NewsSome of us still remember 2016, when we had a couple of cars sorta half-driving themselves, and Tesla, Uber and others promised we were only one year or two away from three million people in the US working as drivers being out of a job. And here we are, a decade later. AI is pretty amazing, but companies have a tendency to severely and comically overestimate and oversell it's capabilities, and underestimate the challenges.
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> And here we are, a decade later.
With Waymo and Tesla increasingly doing what they said they would do, and a small number of early adopters happily paying money for their services, that do work.
So what's the critique? That the timelines are not correct? Sure. And how about the timeline of the people who said "research level math, never in my lifetime" and the people inside the ai companies who are apparently increasingly spooked by how quick the progress is? How about the various levels of code/programming jobs that AI was supposedly never going to be able to do, but, in reality, now just does?
We are engaging in some very one-sided discrediting, and I am not sure, why.
Driving a car is unimaginably more difficult than proving the Riemann hypothesis.
You just don’t notice that because evolution has given you 99% of what is needed to drive a car before you were even born.
I remember a biologist wryly commenting that it took a lot longer to evolve good senses and appendages in nature than to evolve human intelligence, compared to the ape niveau.
Maybe the really hard thing isn't abstract cognitive capability, but perception+movement.