Suggestions for using AI

[Peterkin]

2 hours ago, mistermack said:

It looks right now like driverless is the inevitable future.

Yes, that's what I was driving at, as well... assuming the whole house of cards doesn't collapse first.

Ideally, of course, the whole business of running the world should be handed off to Big Brain. It might get some things wrong (according to some people), but it couldn't possibly botch things as badly as we have.

Edited August 7, 2023 by Peterkin

[TheVat]

3 hours ago, Genady said:

To convert a YouTube video to a well-organized written article.

For some videos that might be analogous to lifting matter from inside the event horizon of a black hole.  Could AI organize Hawking radiation?  

1 hour ago, mistermack said:

I think AI is ideal for crime detection, and offender profiling.

I believe that there is already some sort of software to identify patterns in offending, but running AI over the details of offences will be much more efficient, I would have thought. 

Would also help in medicine, where pattern recognition by humans can be assisted by AI.  IIRC, it's already being used to look at internal scans (like x-rays) and notice anomalies that a physician may miss.  It's the physician who interprets and finds meaning in the scan, but AI can sometimes point out there is something there.

[Genady]

53 minutes ago, TheVat said:

For some videos that might be analogous to lifting matter from inside the event horizon of a black hole.

I can imagine it to be so if there is little text and the video contains mostly visual and auditory images. These videos don't need to be converted. Let's limit my request to videos that try to convey a textual information / message.

[npts2020]

On 8/6/2023 at 6:54 PM, wtf said:

18 confirmed autonomous vehicle deaths so far and counting. The evidence does not support your hope.

These deaths are NOT in an automated system! They are result of trying to mix predictable automation with unpredictable human action.

 

On 8/6/2023 at 11:45 AM, TheVat said:

Though it might not be real fun to be in a fast-moving vehicle when a strong solar flare causes a massive EMP on Earth.  Maybe it could work okay with robust Faraday caging and a good onboard mechanical backup that reliably stops the vehicle if there is electronic failure.

On 8/6/2023 at 8:14 AM, mistermack said:

This is why you build "fail-safe" shutdowns into the system.

[mistermack]

8 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

This is why you build "fail-safe" shutdowns into the system.

We do have fly-by-wire in jet aircraft. If it's ok for planes, it should be manageable in road vehicles. 

I wouldn't fancy having it on my motorbike though. 

[John Cuthber]

3 hours ago, mistermack said:

We do have fly-by-wire in jet aircraft. If it's ok for planes, it should be manageable in road vehicles. 

 

Planes don't typically have to navigate round buildings or account for children , wheelchair users, cyclists ...
Essentially, there's nothing up there to hit.

[swansont]

4 hours ago, npts2020 said:

These deaths are NOT in an automated system! They are result of trying to mix predictable automation with unpredictable human action.

But if there are more deaths (or accidents) from an automated system as compared to human-controlled, it means the automation is the problem, and not (yet) a solution.

[mistermack]

I think in a country like the US, you have to be careful that you are comparing like with like. Collisions per million miles are going to be far higher in urban settings, than out on the freeway. How much higher I couldn't find figures for, but it would appear obvious that rolling along on lightly used wide open roads at 60mph is far less hazardous to drivers and pedestrians than nipping from lights to lights in the city. More so in a country like the USA that has long distances between urban areas. 

I don't know what sort of tests they are carrying out with the autonomous vehicles, but I doubt if they are doing much rolling along near-empty interstate highways. What would they learn from that kind of sterile test? It's more likely they will be running the test cars in urban areas, and if so, you would expect the collisions per million miles to be much higher than the national average. Comparing them to the national urban average might be more realistic, but I don't know if such a number exists, or indeed where they are testing these cars. 

2 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

Planes don't typically have to navigate round buildings or account for children , wheelchair users, cyclists ...
Essentially, there's nothing up there to hit.

Quite right. So long as you stay up there, you are extremely safe. 🙂

Edited August 9, 2023 by mistermack

[Sensei]

2 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

Planes don't typically have to navigate round buildings or account for children , wheelchair users, cyclists ...
Essentially, there's nothing up there to hit.

..with the exception of billions of flying objects (aka "birds") that are not/are hardly detectable by radar..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike

"A significant threat to flight safety, bird strikes have caused a number of accidents with human casualties.[3] There are over 13,000 bird strikes annually in the US alone."

"Most accidents occur when a bird (or birds) collides with the windscreen or is sucked into the engine of jet aircraft. These cause annual damages that have been estimated at $400 million[3] within the United States alone and up to $1.2 billion to commercial aircraft worldwide."

 

With the most famous case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549

 

 

[Peterkin]

45 minutes ago, mistermack said:

Collisions per million miles are going to be far higher in urban settings, than out on the freeway.

True. But low-speed collisions are less often fatal. Also, the wide open road is a clear and constant invitation to speed, pass and take stupid chances. (I know: I live on an ordinary two-lane highway, and even that can be hair-raising on Friday and Sunday evenings.)

 

45 minutes ago, mistermack said:

I don't know what sort of tests they are carrying out with the autonomous vehicles

Lots of them    http:// https://www.tuvsud.com/en-us/industries/mobility-and-automotive/automotive-and-oem/autonomous-driving

and the one I linked yesterday

Quote

set up like a mock city, including everything from high-speed roads to suburban driveways to a railroad crossing....

Waymo uses the 37 pre-crash scenarios based on the almost 6 million police-reported light vehicle crashes that NHTSA recommends for testing as a starting place.

 

Edited August 9, 2023 by Peterkin

[mistermack]

I finally found a page that tells the rural vs urban story for the US, and my guess is miles out. Overall urban vs rural mileage in the USA is actually roughly equal, which comes as a big surprise. And the death rate per million miles isn't much different between the two, something that comes as a surprise to me. In the UK, we are always being told that the motorways are by far the safest roads for miles driven. Maybe they are in the US too, but the if so, the other rural roads are more than making up for it. It varies a lot, from state to state. Here's a national breakdown : 

[swansont]

In 2021, the rate of crash deaths per 100 million miles traveled was much higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.72 in rural areas compared with 1.19 in urban areas). From 1977 to 2021, the rates decreased by 60 percent in rural areas (from 4.35 to 1.72) and 49 percent in urban areas (from 2.35 to 1.19)

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban-rural-comparison#:~:text=In 2021%2C the rate of,(from 2.35 to 1.19).

(I read a story about the mayor (IIRC) touting the safety of Boston because of the low fatality rate, but the article pointed out that no, Boston drivers are pretty reckless when traffic isn’t congested, but the accident is reported quickly and victims can be taken by helicopter to a nearby hospital.)

And single-vehicle crashes have a higher fatality rate. (Not being reported quickly and no medivac if it’s in a more remote area probably contributes)

Also, single-car accidents are a big problem

In 2021, single-vehicle crashes accounted for 52 percent of crash deaths in both rural and urban areas.

 

Rural accidents at 55+ mph had significantly more fatalities than urban. Urban driving killed a lot more pedestrians and cyclists than rural.

[mistermack]

Maybe they could fit autonomous vehicles with an accelerometer and fixed phone, that would notify emergency services of a crash, and the location and severity, and even put them in touch with the driver, in the case of a crash. The hardware cost would be minimal in today's tech climate, compared to the price of a vehicle. 

[npts2020]

11 hours ago, swansont said:

But if there are more deaths (or accidents) from an automated system as compared to human-controlled, it means the automation is the problem, and not (yet) a solution.

I guess you are right, computer controlled vehicles can't operate as safely as humans. You need to let the space shuttle people know so they can put human pilots in charge next time to be safer.

[wtf]

3 hours ago, npts2020 said:

I guess you are right, computer controlled vehicles can't operate as safely as humans. You need to let the space shuttle people know so they can put human pilots in charge next time to be safer.

Put the space shuttle on the street in a dense urban downtown, and see how it operates. 

Do you know what coning is? I just ran across this a while back. Anti-car activists in SF are against self-driving cars too, on the theory that wide adoption of self-driving cars reduces the political impetus for more and better transit. And actually that's a very good point, I wonder if the autonomous enthusiasts have thought about that? Why pay for buses and subways when everyone can just hop in a software-controlled Uber. So that's a social point to consider. I assume a lot of autonomous fans are also fans of transit. Autonomous cars are cars, and if you think we'd all be better off with fewer cars, autonomous vehicles are not the way to go. Just something to think about.

So there are some anti-car activists in San Francisco called the Safe Street Rebels, I linked their website for anyone interested.

https://www.safestreetrebel.com/

They have discovered that if you put an orange traffic cone on the hood of one of the experimental Cruise autonomous taxis cruising, so to speak, around town ... the vehicle stops dead in its tracks and can't move till someone from the Cruise company comes to reset it. 

This practice is called coning. Human ingenuity always finds a way around tech. I hope people will click on that link, there's a video of the group coning Cruise cars all over town. In the glorious one-size-fits-all future of the great AI brain that tells everyone exactly what they may do, there will always be people and groups hacking the system. 

I'm wondering, when @Peterkinis done busting down the doors of gun owners, will he bust down the doors of the members of Safe Street Rebels too? 

I was a little bit put off by the authoritarianism of that earlier remark and moved to push back if I may. It puts the AI-mind controlling all the cars in a very different light. Your car goes where the Big Electric Brain says it does, and we bust down the door of anyone exercising their Constitutional rights. You didn't suggest passing a referendum to tax guns out of existence. You didn't suggest a grass roots campaign to abolish the second amendment. Those are legitimate, democratic means of addressing your concerns about guns. But no, you just want to bust down the door of anyone whose opinion you disagree with. 

It sounds like your Big Electric Brain is just more authoritarianism and a lot less democracy.

I'll take democracy and individual autonomy. The global control freaks will never win.

I did want to add that many people wrote thoughtful replies to my link about the 18 deaths. My point is more that I oppose the centralization implied by the Big AI controller, and I put that together with the door kicking. That's more important to me than exactly how many people get killed. I'm perfectly well aware of the statistics on human drivers, about 100 a day in the US. And I agree that there are a lot of people who shouldn't be driving. If autonomous vehicles take some drunks off the road I'm all for it. 

It's the centralization and the authoritarianism that concern me. In fact even from an engineering point of view, I think a distributed network of autonomous vehicles is far preferable to a Big Brain controller architecture. For one thing, the latter is a single point of failure. When it glitches the entire country glitches. And it would be a target for every cyberhacker in the world. Banks, health care services, even cities have had to pay off cyberattackers because the attackers can not be defeated. Imagine one single big computer system running all the transportation in the country. A huge disaster waiting to happen.

 

Edited August 10, 2023 by wtf

[StringJunky]

32 minutes ago, wtf said:

The global control freaks will never win.

The winners write the history books.

Quote

I'll take democracy and individual autonomy.

"Share it fairly, but don't take a slice of my pie", you mean.

Edited August 10, 2023 by StringJunky

[John Cuthber]

16 hours ago, Sensei said:

..with the exception of billions of flying objects (aka "birds") that are not/are hardly detectable by radar..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike

"A significant threat to flight safety, bird strikes have caused a number of accidents with human casualties.[3] There are over 13,000 bird strikes annually in the US alone."

"Most accidents occur when a bird (or birds) collides with the windscreen or is sucked into the engine of jet aircraft. These cause annual damages that have been estimated at $400 million[3] within the United States alone and up to $1.2 billion to commercial aircraft worldwide."

 

With the most famous case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549

 

 

Yes, Thankfully, the 1956 "keep bloody well flying" legislation ensured that all birds never to get close enough to the ground for them to  be an issue for cars.

Seriously, I think the best known advice in this context is "thaw the chicken".

[Sensei]

@John Cuthber

Aren't you the missing member of Monty Python?

[swansont]

8 hours ago, npts2020 said:

I guess you are right, computer controlled vehicles can't operate as safely as humans. You need to let the space shuttle people know so they can put human pilots in charge next time to be safer.

The statistics speak to that. As with John Cuthber’s comment earlier, the space shuttle didn’t have to avoid pedestrians and cyclists, or heed stop lights and signs, or contend with other shuttles in its flight path. Or traffic cones.

I’m confident that an automated vehicle could do quite well if it was alone in an obstacle-free area, and needed to get from point A to B, even if there were some speed changes and path corrections that needed to be made.

You need to look at what the self-driving algorithms are having trouble with. Making the car move at its desired speed and choosing the path aren’t near the top of the list.

[Peterkin]

9 hours ago, wtf said:

Autonomous cars are cars, and if you think we'd all be better off with fewer cars, autonomous vehicles are not the way to go.

Not necessarily. Autonomous vehicles are trucks, buses, subways and  trains,

 

9 hours ago, wtf said:

I'm wondering, when @Peterkinis done busting down the doors of gun owners, will he bust down the doors of the members of Safe Street Rebels too? 

Not necessary: I'll have my robocops catch them in the act, videotape them and slap a hefty fine on them for disrupting traffic.

9 hours ago, wtf said:

Your car goes where the Big Electric Brain says it does, and we bust down the door of anyone exercising their Constitutional rights. You didn't suggest passing a referendum to tax guns out of existence. You didn't suggest a grass roots campaign to abolish the second amendment. Those are legitimate, democratic means of addressing your concerns about guns. But no, you just want to bust down the door of anyone whose opinion you disagree with. 

Quite the strong reaction to an offhand joke. Okay, I'll respond seriously. First: the US constitution is not the only one in the world - ours doesn't allow everybody and his five-year-old to own assault rifles. Second: that amendment clearly requires a "well-regulated militia" and that's not what I saw on January 6. Half a sentence doth not holy writ make. Third: a grass roots movement can't accomplish anything against entrenched NRA and arms manufacturer backed politicians.   Fourth: I have nothing against their doors; it's just the guns I don't want to leave lying around. If they want to kill one another badly enough, let them use golf clubs, kitchen knives, baseball bats and hammers - direct, personal methods, with implements that have a positive use when it's not being a weapon. At least they won't be able to use cars as weapons, once the autonomous driver takes over. (I may have slipped a bit off the serious near the end...)

 

9 hours ago, wtf said:

I'll take democracy and individual autonomy. The global control freaks will never win.

They already have. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/06/11/what-rupert-murdoch-owns/71089066/

 

9 hours ago, wtf said:

It's the centralization and the authoritarianism that concern me. In fact even from an engineering point of view, I think a distributed network of autonomous vehicles is far preferable to a Big Brain controller architecture.

Okay. Not sure how that works in a city, but it could. I'm all for distributed local production of all essentials, including energy and food. Democracy and autonomy would be nice, too. So would equality and social justice. Well, you can't have everything, but at least you get to keep your gun.... for now...

Edited August 10, 2023 by Peterkin

[TheVat]

Will carry around a grin all morning over "coning" driverless cars.  And I like the Rebels deeper point, which is that the population density of large cities makes mass transit, like tubes underground, a far better and more economical way for people to get around.  

Driverless cars seem like a way for AI to implement the stupidest kinds of urban planning.  

[npts2020]

14 hours ago, swansont said:

The statistics speak to that. As with John Cuthber’s comment earlier, the space shuttle didn’t have to avoid pedestrians and cyclists, or heed stop lights and signs, or contend with other shuttles in its flight path. Or traffic cones.

Exactly. That is why a self contained system will be required, otherwise you are trying to automate a system that is centuries old...

[wtf]

20 hours ago, StringJunky said:

The winners write the history books.

Yes you're right. I did go off the deep end into optimism (uncharacteristic of me) that autonomy and liberty would win. But the history of the world does not support my hope at all, let alone the world that we see around us. 

 

20 hours ago, StringJunky said:

"Share it fairly, but don't take a slice of my pie", you mean.

That was in response for my belief in democracy and autonomy. In that context I did not understand this remark. Perhaps I'm too optimistic about democracy too. I think my point was local control rather than centralized. In the 20th century we've seen the fate of the centralized systems: Mao and Stalin being two striking examples. Replacing a dictator with an AI is even worse. Who programs it? All algorithms have bias. Who are the ones in control? What a totalitarian nightmare.

I am for local control wherever possible, and as much as possible. And I'm strongly against the idea of having giant computers run a centralized economy. My God, didn't anyone learn anything about the planned economies of China and Russia in the twentieth century? 

Central planning failed. People should take that into consideration when speculating on big electronic brains running the world or for that matter supporting world governments. Top-down autocracies don't work.

 

 

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Not necessarily. Autonomous vehicles are trucks, buses, subways and  trains,

Yes ok, sure. The point of anti-car people is the same. Instead of light rail, we'll be building more roads for autonomous trucks. And we won't need subways, we'll just have automated Ubers taking everyone around. 

The result would be less mass transit and more roads. It's not entirely the world we want to live in. I'm not necessarily making that argument myself, but I am noting that the argument could be made. 

 

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Not necessary: I'll have my robocops catch them in the act, videotape them and slap a hefty fine on them for disrupting traffic.

Nice of you to grant Constitutional rights to SOME people, anyway. Can we see a list of the Constitutional rights you'll allow and which people you'll suspend them for so you can crush their houses? You did say crush their houses, did you not?

 

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Quite the strong reaction to an offhand joke.

The joke was a thin disguise for the obvious truth of how you feel about Constitutional rights in the face of laws you disagree with. Many people feel that way these days. It's the new leftist authoritarianism. I oppose it.

 

 

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

First: the US constitution is not the only one in the world - ours doesn't allow everybody and his five-year-old to own assault rifles. Second: that amendment clearly requires a "well-regulated militia" and that's not what I saw on January 6.

Ahhhh, in the end the house-crushing is for the red hat brigade, the half of the country you don't like. You want to crush their houses. Got it. You disagree with their politics, AND you want to crush them as human beings. 

How do you think that kind of thinking is going to work out for all of us? I know it's very popular in some circles. It's dangerous.

But gun rights are not the point. Whether you like guns or not, the second amendment is the law of the land. You have the opportunity to work to repeal it, or to locally nullify it with taxes and litigation. 

But you are interested in none of that. You want to crush the houses of the people who exercise legal rights that you don't like.

I see that you are taking my words as gun advocacy. They should be taken as advocacy of following the law and following the Constitution, as opposed to simply wreaking violence on everyone you don't like. 

I actually have no interest in gun politics, no dog in the fight, no emotional interest one way or the other. I am passionate about having a civil, pluralistic society with respect for the law; as opposed to crushing the houses of people whose legal rights you simply don't like.

 

 

 

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Half a sentence doth not holy writ make. Third: a grass roots movement can't accomplish anything against entrenched NRA and arms manufacturer backed politicians.   Fourth: I have nothing against their doors; it's just the guns I don't want to leave lying around. If they want to kill one another badly enough, let them use golf clubs, kitchen knives, baseball bats and hammers - direct, personal methods, with implements that have a positive use when it's not being a weapon. At least they won't be able to use cars as weapons, once the autonomous driver takes over.

You're ranting (pardon my frankness) about guns. You're so fanatical about the issue that you can't even see that I have no interest in guns and am not making a gun rights argument in the least. 

I'm standing for pluralism and respect for the law. I don't care if you start a crusade to overturn the second amendment. I do care that you want to skip the democratic process stage to get directly to the house crushing. That's a very dangerous impulse.

That's the politics of a three year old. "I'm super emotional so I'll destroy things I don't like." An authoritarian three year old. Many people think and feel and act as you do these days. I'm concerned with that trend. That's why I'm calling it out.

 

 

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

(I may have slipped a bit off the serious near the end...)

You're deadly serious about your authoritarian, anti-democratic desire to crush the houses of the people who have opinions and legal possessions that you don't like. 

Can you see that that's a very slippery slope for a society? Once you start crushing houses, what's going to keep your house standing up? See the French revolution for a bloody datapoint.

 

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Okay. Not sure how that works in a city, but it could. I'm all for distributed local production of all essentials, including energy and food. Democracy and autonomy would be nice, too. So would equality and social justice. Well, you can't have everything, but at least you get to keep your gun.... for now...

 

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

They already have. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/06/11/what-rupert-murdoch-owns/71089066/

Yes you are right, autonomy and democracy are in trouble, the only question is who gets to own everything. 

Edited August 11, 2023 by wtf

[Peterkin]

36 minutes ago, wtf said:

Yes ok, sure. The point of anti-car people is the same. Instead of light rail, we'll be building more roads for autonomous trucks. And we won't need subways, we'll just have automated Ubers taking everyone around. 

Why? Autonomous mass transit is perfectly feasible. The autonomous trucks don't need any more roads; there are way too many roads already.

 

36 minutes ago, wtf said:

You're ranting (pardon my frankness) about guns. You're so fanatical about the issue that you can't even see that what I'm unhappy about, is your desire to crush the houses (you did say that, didn't you?) of people exercising their legal rights, simply because you don't like those rights and you are very emotional about it.

Of course I know what you're fretting about. You think the only way to be free is the Davy Crockett way. Well, he was an ass. Having a constitution ought to mean that laws are based on the welfare of the entire polity, not that some people run off with a fragment of text and do whatever the hell thy like, because they have a powerful lobby and craven, corrupt politicians. if I'm emotional, it's about people exercising their gun rights school-children.

 

36 minutes ago, wtf said:

You're deadly serious about your authoritarian, anti-democratic desire to crush the houses of the people who have opinions and legal possessions that you don't like

I have no designs on their doors, nor on their houses, or whatever other property you're worried about. Just the guns. That's not negotiable. And be warned: I'll be demilitarizing the police next. 

36 minutes ago, wtf said:

Can you see that that's a very slippery slope for a society?

Yep. Pretty soon, I'll demand to see those kids who have not been gunned down in their classroom properly fed and given adequate medical care, even if their parents are poor. Catastrophe is sure to follow.

 

36 minutes ago, wtf said:

Yes you are right, autonomy and democracy are in trouble, the only question is who gets to own everything. 

Quote

Billionaires play an outsized role in shaping the global economy, politics, and philanthropy. Forbes puts the number of billionaires in the world at 2,640 in 2023. The wealthiest among them is Elon Musk; CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of Twitter

He's an ass, too.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Peterkin

[swansont]

9 hours ago, npts2020 said:

Exactly. That is why a self contained system will be required, otherwise you are trying to automate a system that is centuries old...

Roads are not a self-contained system.