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Comment by dilemma | Hacker News Reader

This is a false dichotomy and just not representative of reality.

There can never be self-driving cars because the type of generalized intelligence that would be required is impossible to achieve. The fact remains that a computer program can only do what it is told, it cannot think. Code has no mind.

So what the choice is between is, instead, someone (Tesla) pushing out a falsely marketed support system that does none of the things it is believe to be able to, and causes unnecessary deaths and injuries. And, on the other hand, thorough testing to uncover the possibilities and limits of the technology, to produce a reliable, usable product.

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This is a little simplistic. Computers can do things they aren't heuristically programmed to do - that's the basic idea behind machine learning. I've seen some incredibly impressive robots that ran entirely on neural nets and never failed, but because it was impossible to understand how they worked they could only be used for demonstration purposes as guaranteeing safety was impossible.

What you seem to be referring to is true AI. I agree we are nowhere close to anything resembling true AI, but I do believe something representative of a computer that can "think" will appear in the coming decades.

That said, you can program a car heuristically. Statistically speaking, the unknown unknowns are so rare that assuming it doesn't fail under expected conditions you can guarantee it to be safer than humans. The unknown unknowns are not the problem right now, it's just dealing with limited sensor input (cars have a hard time "seeing" what's around them) and making sense of the world around it.

There is a considerable ongoing research effort in formal verification of learned systems. Once an ML system has been trained, it becomes deterministic and can be tested.

That sounds neat. Can you link me to a paper?

"Computers can only do what they are programmed to do" is the slogan of a 1950s advertising/propaganda campaign by IBM to alleviate fears that the newly-birthed field of AI would create computers which would not only do what they were programmed to do.

Which is precisely what AI is about. Getting computers to effectively program themselves toward some specified goal. In which case, the problem becomes "be careful what you wish for". The paperclip maximiser AI is one such cautionary tale. HAL in 2001 was an exceptionally thinly veiled reference to IBM, no matter how loud Clarke and Kubrick's protestations to the contrary.

On the Media on IBM and AI:

http://www.wnyc.org/story/engineering-intelligence/

There are numerous IBM logos throughout 2001. One is noted in this Slate piece:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_...

And it points to a now-removed YouTube video pointing out numerous other instances:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1r5dOwUS6Y

The logos also appear on the Newspad, in various shipboard equipment, and elsewhere.

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