[LINK] Cars, again

[David]

On Mon, 13 Nov 2017 11:49:31 Jim Birch wrote:

> Auto-industry elder statesman declares game over. “It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.  [...]  The end state will be the fully autonomous module [...]

The prognostications of so-called "elder statesmen" do not have a good record.  Although Thomas Watson probably didn't make the famous statement about a market for only five computers, plenty of others made similar predictions at the time.  More recently we had the Prime Minister, an experienced & senior lawyer, declare that Barnaby Joyce was eligible to sit in Parliament "and the High Court will so hold".

A fully autonomous vehicle which can be trusted as a functional replacement for a conventional one would have to have the same reliability as an expert human driver who is not tired, under the affluence of inchohol or other substances, and generally in good form.

Now driving in dificult conditions probably uses a significant part of the human brain.  Leaving aside the issue of consciousness and the extent to which that might be necessary, the number of synapses in the human brain is estimated as about 16*10^8 synapses per cubic millimetre - see
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/9/7/722/270779/Estimation-of-the-Number-of-Synapses-in-the

Furthermore, the brain has evolved its capability over many millions of years.

While the neural networks of AI developers may resemble the one between our ears in some respects, it's pretty clear they're not within cooee in terms of scale & complexity.

I don't think we're going to see any autonomous vehicle with the capability of an expert human driver in the forseeable future, despite the Tesla.  But that's setting a high bar, and it's easy to see more specialised autonomous vehicles like the bus mentioned by Marghanita - see
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/technology-infusion/autonobus

Finally, AI has been around since the early 1960s, when it was confidently predicted we'd see human-like intelligence in 10 or 15 years.  I can remember my supervisor experimenting with neural networks even then, and sure enough you could see it "learning",

David L.