Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 July 2013 06:46PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 July 2013 06:56:52PM 4 points [-]

Also: A priori and in advance of learning the true outcome, I'm betting most would have thought that highway and city driving was a more difficult application for AI than cleaning a bachelor pad.

Comment author: Halfwitz 24 July 2013 08:07:42PM *  6 points [-]

Really? I think of roads and highways as simple prepared environments, on which even the unexpected can be handled with relatively few actions - swerve, stop. A bathroom can be messy in a ridiculous variety of ways.

Comment author: bogdanb 24 July 2013 10:12:43PM 5 points [-]

I realize this doesn’t exactly contradict you, but even if true (and it probably is/was) I think those “most” would not in fact think of difficulty but rather of how well you need to solve the problem. That is, a bathroom-cleaning robot that misplaces the shampoo five percent of the time might be considered “solved problem”, but a self-driving car that “misplaces” the car even one percent of the time would sound very scary. I think it’s the difference in “acceptance criteria” that makes people misrank tasks rather than relative difficulty.

Comment author: Randy_M 26 July 2013 04:27:32PM 2 points [-]

I think that's because driving has to be done perfectly or there are dire consequences, which might mask the fact that it isn't as complex, compared with cleaning a bathroom, which has many tasks that could or could not be done based on the standard imposed.

Comment author: Lumifer 26 July 2013 04:43:57PM 1 point [-]

Driving is considerably more complex than cleaning a bathroom, primarily because you need to interact with a large number of humans whose mental state ranges from fairly rational to OMGWTF.

Comment author: Randy_M 26 July 2013 04:56:00PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but in context there are still a fairly limited number of things that they can do--stop, reverse, speed up, slow down, change direction, etc.--even if it is hard to predict which and when they will do so.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 July 2013 07:02:49PM *  1 point [-]

I'd wager that Lumifer comes from a place where drivers are much crazier than where you come from. There are huge differences in stuff like that from city to city.

Comment author: Randy_M 29 July 2013 02:27:54PM -1 points [-]

Yes, but are there differences beyond "change in acceleration"? (given acceleration as a vector).

Comment author: [deleted] 29 July 2013 07:08:01PM 1 point [-]

Just because you can measure something with three real numbers doesn't mean that their prior probability distribution isn't all over the place.

Comment author: Lumifer 29 July 2013 05:39:49PM 0 points [-]

Nope. I'm talking about humans, not drivers.

That involves pedestrians, people on bicycles and skateboards, kids playing ball near the street, panhandlers who want to wash your windshield, etc. etc.