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gwern comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 01 December 2012 05:00AM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 December 2012 07:31:58PM 6 points [-]

I'm 59. It didn't seem to me as though things changed very much until the 90's. Microwaves and transistor radios are very nice, but not the same sort of qualitative jump as getting on line.

And now we're in a era where it's routine to learn about extrasolar planets-- admittedly not as practical as access to the web, but still amazing.

I'm not sure whether we're careening towards a singularity, though I admit that self-driving cars are showing up much earlier than I expected.

Did anyone else expect that self-driving cars would be so much easier than natural language?

Comment author: gwern 15 December 2012 05:24:18AM 2 points [-]

Did anyone else expect that self-driving cars would be so much easier than natural language?

I was very surprised. I had been using Google Translate and before that Babel Fish for years, and expected them to slowly incrementally improve as they kept on doing; self-driving cars, on the other hand, had essentially no visible improvement to me in the 1990s and the 2000s essentially up to the second DARPA challenge where (to me) they did the proverbial '0 to 60'.