AI future: Nvidia boffin hopes 'everything that moves will eventually be autonomous' The GenAI Summit 2024 opened at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, and the people, who came to hear about artificial intelligence, had made a mess of things. Around 0900, as things were getting underway, a large crowd of attendees waited outside the venue in disorganized lines, held up as staff …
"First, the environment needs to be open-ended enough because the agent's capability will ultimately be upper-bounded by the environment complexity," said Fan. "And the planet Earth we live on is a perfect example, because Earth is so complex that it allows an algorithm called natural evolution over billions of years to create all the humans in this room."
There are two core problems with this statement, [1] the Earth is a closed system, albeit with energy fed from outside, not open-ended at all; [2] natural evolution is not an algorithm -- it's an outcome of multiple independent processes.
It would be really great if public pronouncements (particularly those made by leading technocrats) were more often based on real knowledge in the areas they discuss. Then the myth that everything can be computerised (just like the 19th century myth that everything could be driven by, first, steam, and then electricity) would at last be recognised as just that -- a myth. There's an old Dilbert cartoon in which D states that there's an engineering solution to every problem. As an engineer, I can categorically state that he was wrong -- a huge array of human/social problems can not be overcome by engineering, they can only be buried from view by it while persisting (or indeed escalating).
They'll have to prise my car keys from my cold, dead hands.
Y'know, 60 years ago, I felt that way about my manual transmission. And I was right, I think. In 1960, automatic transmissions were expensive, failure prone, and pretty much a bundle of potential/actual grief. But they really did get lots better. Albeit slowly. I don't recall that I've driven a manual transmission car for 25 years or so. Don't really miss manual transmissions except maybe a couple of times when it would have been handy to be able to start a car with a failing starter or half dead battery by turning the ignition on, letting the car roll a bit, then popping the clutch.
I expect the same is true of autonomous vehicles. Except that the autonomous driving problem (except maybe on limited access highways) looks to be much tougher than that of designing a satisfactory and durable automatic transmission.. You might well manage to live a long, healthy, productive life before (near) universal vehicle autonomy becomes a reality.
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