Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

ccaaaaaeeeeeekkkk

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/04/19/us/politics/ap-us-aviation-bill-senate.html

re: the amazon delivery drones, the senate passed a bill

WASHINGTON — The Senate approved a bipartisan aviation policy bill Tuesday that would boost airport security, extend new protections to airline passengers and help speed the introduction of package-delivery drones.

...The bill also would remove obstacles to commercial use of drones while enhancing privacy and safety protections. It requires that within two years the FAA authorize package deliveries by drones. The agency would create a small drone "air carrier certificate" for operators of delivery drone fleets, similar to the safety certificates granted to commercial airlines. The rules are needed for Amazon and other companies to deploy fleets of delivery drones.

Another provision would establish criminal penalties for the reckless use of drones, aimed at penalizing operators who fly drones near airports without prior approval. Another provision requiring the TSA to restore passenger screening at small airports where airline service has been reduced would force the agency "to reallocate staff and equipment from higher-risk, higher-need facilities," the White House said in a statement.

The White House criticized the bill's delivery-drone language as "overly prescriptive" and said it would disrupt the agency's ongoing efforts to write safety regulations for commercial drone flights.

I don't get the point of drone delivery. It seems like they are looking for a more efficient way for people to lose their packages.

i dunno, UPS is doing a good job of making it look good. two days ago they tried to deliver a wedding dress to our apartment, but we missed them by 15 minutes. so instead they left a message saying they'd drop off the package to a random cell phone store about a mile away (?!). the next day we went there at noon, but the store was closed (because it's a shitty random cell phone store). we went again later in the day, but the package wasn't there. the UPS tracking said that the package was en route to the auxiliary dropoff point (?). today the tracker said that it had been delivered - to the shitty random cell phone store. which may or may not be open.

so i don't know, i get the appeal of a little flying thing landing at your front door. it's all a moot point for me, though, because from what i've seen it seems tailor made for the suburban lifestyle - big grassy front yards and lots of space. i can't see a tiny drone landing next to a city apartment anytime soon.

Well see, UPS is showing you a very inefficient way of losing a package. The Amazon model loads the package into a drone, it flies away, and then *poof* package gone.

but imagine the poignant moment as you run outside and catch just a faint distant image of the drone flying into the sunset, with your errant package dangling precariously by one little claw

I have a really big tree in my yard. I keep wondering if someday in the future, I will see some amazon drones in it

drone delivery strikes me like VR and not-strictly-necessary bionic augmentation: thanks for the offer, I'll check back in 20 years once you've worked all the kinks out

kinky drones, now we're talking

but imagine the poignant moment as you run outside and catch just a faint distant image of the drone flying into the sunset, with your errant package dangling precariously by one little claw

i guess late stage capitalism does have a little romance to it.

* Software is too hard to write. Autonomous vehicles will likely require complicated parallel programs that must be bug free. Compilers (and static analysis) need to advance.

+ A BILLION

make em write it all in ada

https://www.rust-lang.org/

I'm picturing y'all chasing down your Amazon and UPS drones like

http://www.jeditemplearchives.com/galleries/2014/Review_ObiWanKenobiCoruscantChaseSWS/Review_ObiWanKenobiCoruscantChaseSWS_still.jpg

I have had excellent UPS service and every time I see complaints I cross my fingers and hope I'm not some weird outlier who is going to wake up some day to realize they started delivering my packages to the dump

In an unusual alliance between a traditional automaker and a technology company, Ford Motor and Google on Wednesday joined to lead a coalition of companies that advocate federal approval of driverless cars in the near future.

...At Wednesday’s hearing at Stanford University in California, the nation’s top auto safety regulator, Mark Rosekind, said the federal government was hopeful that driverless technology could help reduce the annual death toll from traffic accidents. In 2014, the last year for which data was available, 32,675 people died in auto accidents.

Mr. Rosekind said that more than 90 percent of vehicle accidents every year were the result of decisions made by drivers at the wheel — and self-driving technology had the potential to prevent at least some of those accidents.

“We are focused on promoting safety innovation that can do the most to save lives,” he said.

Automakers are already putting some self-driving features, like automatic braking and steering, in current models. But the coalition led by Ford and Google is urging swift passage of regulations that allow for totally autonomous vehicles.

In addition to Ford and Google, the coalition includes the Swedish carmaker Volvo and the ride-sharing firms Lyft and Uber. The spokesman for the group is David Strickland, a predecessor of Mr. Rosekind’s as the head of the safety agency.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/business/ford-and-google-team-up-tosupport-driverless-cars.html

Ban human-driven cars by 2025 imo

http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/28/movidius-fathom-neural-compute-stick/

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a82/bobbysixer/aicap_zpsu0je6wmp.jpg

My last attempt to use that image recognition site ^ said "I'm not sure, but I think it's a picture." Well, yes, I suppose it would be.

any thoughts on this guy? pretty interesting stuff

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/

So he started fitting out the car last November and hoped to have a world class vehicle ready by May? If he's driving for ten hours a day every day that's less than 2000 hours of training. No thanks.

Update: by Feb he'd managed 100 hours (!) of training, and he hopes to release by the end of the year. Fingers crossed eh George!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/03/08/george-hotz-comma-ai/#32fe0499493b

This article was fascinating, and perhaps suggests some ways forward for AI modeling...

Tesla driver killed in crash while using 'Autopilot' self-driving feature

Tesla driver killed in crash while using 'Autopilot' self-driving feature

I wrote about this on Twitter. Background subtraction (i.e. image segmentation) was blamed. This is exactly the problem I outlined above.

A lot of people are claiming that even current self-driving cars are "safer" than human-driven cars, but this seems to me based on the faulty comparison of self-driving to the "average" driver. Most auto-fatalities involve either alcohol, a lack of a seatbelt, or a combination of the two. It should thus not be very reassuring to a sober, seatbelt-wearing person that the self-driving car has a lower fatality rate than humans.

Wait until the first big lawsuit where an injured party (or their estate) sues the manufacturer of a self-driving car for damages due to 'negligence' or 'reckless disregard' and we'll know a lot more about the future of the autonomous vehicle industry.

I'm sorry guys it is a farce, I was the car "self-driver". The front camera had extra glare and I've acquired this tolerance for stimulants that is making them ineffective and when I saw that shiny surface my first thought was that we're having that glare issue again (logged in jira so many times) but maybe I just thought of all those cool movie scenes where a cool little tesla-like car skids under a semi. Yikes. Don't email my boss. Let me self-drive for you in peace

Artificial Intelligence still has some way to go

http://arstechnica.co.uk/the-multiverse/2016/06/sunspring-movie-watch-written-by-ai-details-interview/

It says something that the pop song written by that program was vapid, but almost passable, while the script, where humans must talk to one another and act like humans, sounds barely coherent.

https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/misfortune

but it's so much more fun to paint this as a robocop boardroom demo and draw snide conclusions about how AI still has a long way to go

http://yaroslav.ganin.net/static/deepwarp/

lol, a literal RMDE program

The first program that can roll its eyes at how bad it is.

paging gr8080

http://i.giphy.com/3o6ZsSi98Ugr8mUk9y.gif

This work seems to be aimed pretty directly at creating photo-realistic-animation software. This is the sort of 'artificial intelligence' that has a viable path to its goal, but it is hardly the 'strong ai' that gets all the think-pieces.

also totally pointless/of no actual use to humanity

[finds pic of shakey on wdyll thread, runs it through rmde engine, posts it to thread]

good luck with that

xxxp I don't know. If you add 'artificial intelligence' to your google news right now, for example, you'll get two think-pieces about how emerging interest in AI is an opportunity to bridge the STEM gender gap, a few articles about reasonable AI applications, and maybe one article about someone writing a movie script with the assist of AI.

guys i'm worried this has no use to humanity

that's what they said about ice

Just to be clear, I posted this on this thread because it uses neural networks. Rmde at the ai police.

tbh a "best and creepiest siggraph demos" thread would be pretty grand

https://twitter.com/FioraAeterna/status/758329754386694144

feel like a grad student in...anthropology? might have a field day with the whole "underpaid mechanical turks do stuff while devs work on the AI" thing

or, like, a jacobin thinkpiece

all that stuff is mostly smoke and mirrors that the VC community is mysteriously (well not that mysteriously, they're idiots) buying into

non of these concierge type startups in w'ell-turk-it-for-now-and-use-that-to-train-machine-learning-in-parallel are making any progress whatsover on the training, afaict.

if any companies get anywhere it will be because of structural advantages in training data access, i.e. it will be google or facebook or whoever.

but if you can exit one of those chatbot/turk nonsense startups in the next year or two before the penny drops, good for you.

in the meantime of course the turkers are treated like garbage, but they're organizing (cc hoos) http://wiki.wearedynamo.org/index.php/Guidelines_for_Academic_Requesters