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posted by
martyb
on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:01AM
from the if-it-walks-like-a-duck,-sinks-like-a-duck,-oh,-wait... dept.
from the if-it-walks-like-a-duck,-sinks-like-a-duck,-oh,-wait... dept.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
The duck boat that sank in a Missouri lake last week, killing 17 people, was built based on a design by a self-taught entrepreneur who had no engineering training, according to court records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.
The designer, entrepreneur Robert McDowell, completed only two years of college and had no background, training or certification in mechanics when he came up with the design for "stretch" duck boats more than two decades ago, according to a lawsuit filed over a roadway disaster in Seattle involving a similar duck boat in 2015.
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Duck Boat in Missouri Disaster was Designed by Entrepreneur With no Engineering Training
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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @02:32PM (3 children)
Waymo is using a different model than Tesla is. The extra money is important, but Waymo seems to actually be testing things prior to handing them over to consumers. I'm sure by the time that Waymo offers anything for sale to the consumers it won't kill anybody. There will probably be a lot of other things wrong with it like that it'll spy on people as they drive, but I doubt it'll kill anybody.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:46PM (2 children)
Yes, Waymo is using a different model and they are testing in depth, for example see this recent press release,
https://www.automotivetestingtechnologyinternational.com/news/vehicle-testing/fca-us-adds-62000-chrysler-pacifica-hybrid-minivans-waymos-self-driving-fleet.html [automotivetestingtechnologyinternational.com]
Yes -- they are adding 62 000 minivans to their test fleet. For comparison, that's double the number of vehicles made in total by Tesla in the first quarter this year.
The old saying that you can't "test in reliability" may still be true, but, if you do enough testing, maybe you can approach a acceptable level of reliability?
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday July 26 2018, @09:57PM (1 child)
I'm not looking forward to a future where we can no longer prove a control system is operating correctly. We are going from control systems based on state transition charts and a dynamics model that can be analyzed and proven to have the properties that it is designed for. There can be errors in design that lead to problems but fundamentally you can go back and say "this is exactly what went wrong".
You can't do that with a NN control system. The best you can say is "we made a test case and it no longer faults in that test case." Maybe in the future as network analysis gets better but certainly not right now.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 27 2018, @06:26AM
And after that you'll need robot psychologists to figure out what might have gone wrong...
Seriously though, AI is still at the alchemy stage. They throw stuff into a pot until some recipe works. But they have no real idea on how and why it works.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/ [technologyreview.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/03/googles-ai-turtle-rifle-mit-research-artificial-intelligence [theguardian.com]
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3263755/artificial-intelligence/something-is-still-rotten-in-the-kingdom-of-artificial-intelligence.html [infoworld.com]
I can't find the actual link I have in mind which is about AI's current success showing how it's failing i.e. currently why stuff can "mostly work" is we have huge amounts of samples and we're kinda brute-forcing the solution.
To train a current "AI" that something is a bus we show it huge numbers of photos of buses and huge numbers of other vehicles.
But you don't need to do that when training a dog. A dog can learn what a bus is with far fewer samples. Even a crow with a walnut sized brain can do it with just a few samples.
So current AI tech is actually at quite a dismal and disappointing stage despite some seeming successes.