i no longer want a tesla car

[mister_coffee]

I think the general assumption behind the self-driving car push is that if we throw enough hardware and a big enough training dataset at the problem the system will magically learn how to drive. I don't know if that is true in general, but it is likely true enough in some specific cases to be valuable. That doesn't mean the car will know how to write epic poetry or even how to tell a dirty joke.

Generalized AI is probably decades away, and possibly will never happen. In order to build it we need to understand cognition far better than we do today, and it isn't even clear how we'd actually learn what we need to learn to solve that problem.

[mister_coffee]

...
When we have cars that drive better than we do, we have machines that do every single thing better than us.
how would you feel about your car then?
think about that!
how would your car feel about the feeble nut meat that is unable to work, to grow food, and to get around.
...

Well, I think there are very few activities I do where there aren't others who can do them far better than I. That doesn't mean that those activities aren't enjoyable and worthwhile to me.

My hope would be as we eliminated tedious tasks that we aren't well-suited for (and let's face it, humans were never meant to operate motor vehicles or discharge firearms) we can focus on improving ourselves. Life is full of challenges and surviving the daily highway scrum really isn't a very meaningful or fun one.

In the end I am very doubtful that we can build a machine that would be very good at comforting a friend or throwing a great party.

[mister_coffee]

There is a reason so many of those CAPTCHAs are asking you to identify street signs, traffic lights, trucks, and the like.

They are using you as free labor to build a larger labeled dataset for somebody's self-driving car AI. Or more precisely, for the image recognition AI that would be used in a self-driving car.

My own view on Mr. Musk is that obnoxiously wealthy technology geniuses tend to be, well, obnoxious. Consider Thomas Edison or Henry Ford and some of their bizarre views. Part of the price of moving the technology ball down the field is that we have to put up with the petty knaveries of such people.

As for self-driving cars, my own view is that they are inevitable and will likely be better (or at least safer) drivers than humans are (which bluntly probably is a very low bar, if you watch how most humans drive). How that technology will play out isn't clear to anybody at this point, but it is staggering how much money is chasing the idea of autonomous vehicles right now. And considering that not very long ago the whole idea was basically impossible impressive progress has been made in a very short period of time.

Speaking as an AI researcher, the fact that everybody is off chasing the holy grail of self-driving vehicles means that there are lots of interesting and lucrative problems to chase where one has very little competition.