We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasnāt changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence ā based on the data itās been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance ā nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real āthinkingā AI likely impossible? Because itās bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesnāt hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition ā not a shred ā thereās a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the āhard problem of consciousnessā. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to āhappenā, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
Human drivers are only safe when theyāre not distracted, emotionally disturbed, intoxicated, and physically challenged (vision, muscle control, etc.) 1% of the population has epilepsy, and a large number of them are in denial or simply donāt realize that they have periodic seizures - until they wake up after their crash.
So, yeah, AI isnāt perfect either - and itās not as good as an āidealā human driver, but at what point will AI be better than a typical/average human driver? Not today, Iād say, but soonā¦
Not going to happen soon. Itās the 90 10 problem.
The thing about self driving is that it has been like 90-95% of the way there for a long time now. It made dramatic progress then plateaued, as approaches have failed to close the gap, with exponentially more and more input thrown at it for less and less incremental subjective improvement.
But your point is accurate, that humans have lapses and AI have lapses. The nature of those lapses is largely disjoint, so that makes an opportunity for AI systems to augment a human driver to get the best of both worlds. A constantly consistently vigilant computer driving monitoring and tending the steering, acceleration, and braking to be the ārightā thing in a neutral behavior, with the human looking for more anomolous situations that the AI tends to get confounded about, and making the calls on navigating certain intersections that the AI FSD still canāt figure out. At least for me the worst part of driving is the long haul monotony on freeway where nothing happens, and AI excels at not caring about how monotonous it is and just handling it, so I can pay a bit more attention to what other things on the freeway are doing that might cause me problems.
I donāt have a Tesla, but have a competitor system and have found it useful, though not trustworthy. Itās enough to greatly reduce the drain of driving, but I have to be always looking around, and have to assert control if thereās a traffic jam coming up (it might stop in time, but it certainly doesnāt slow down soon enough) or if I have to do a lane change in some traffic (if traffic conditions are light, it can change langes nicely, but without a whole lot of breathing room, it wonāt do it, which is nice when I can afford to be stupidly cautious).
The one ādriving aidā that I find actually useful is the following distance maintenance cruise control. I set that to the maximum distance it can reliably handle and it removes that ādimensionā of driving problem from needing my constant attention - giving me back that attention to focus on other things (also driving / safety related.) āDumbā cruise control works similarly when thereās no traffic around at all, but having the following distance control makes it useful in traffic. Both kinds of cruise control have certain situations that you need to be aware of and ready to take control back at a momentās notice - preferably anticipating the situation and disengaging cruise control before it has a problem - but those exceptions are pretty rare / easily handled in practice.
Things like lane keeping seem to be more trouble than theyāre worth, to me in the situations I drive in.
Not āAIā but a driving tech that does help a lot is parking cameras. Having those additional perspectives from the camera(s) at different points on the vehicle is a big benefit during close-space maneuvers. Not too surprising that āAIā with access to those tools does better than normal drivers without.
At least in my car, the lane following (not keeping system) is handy because the steering wheel naturally tends to go where it should and less often am I āfightingā the tendency to center. The keeping system is at least for me largely nothing. If I turn signal, it ignores me crossing a lane. If circumstances demand an evasive maneuver that crosses a line, itās resistance isnāt enough to cause an issue. At least mine has fared surprisingly well in areas where the lane markings are all kind of jacked up due to temporary changes for construction. If it is off, then my arms are just having to generally assert more effort to be in the same place I was going to be with the system. Generally no passenger notices when the system engages/disengages in the car except for the chiming it does when it switches over to unaided operation.
So at least my experience has been a positive one, but it hits things just right with intervention versus human attention, including monitoring gaze to make sure I am looking where I should. However there are people who test āhow long can I keep my hands off the steering wheelā, which is a more dangerous mode of thinking.
And yes, having cameras everywhere makes fine maneuvering so much nicer, even with the limited visualization possible in the synthesized āoverheadā view of your car.
The rental cars I have driven with lane keeper functions have all been too aggressive / easily fooled by visual anomalies on the road for me to feel like Iām getting any help. My wife comments on how jerky the car is driving when we have those systems. I donāt feel like itās dangerous, and if I were falling asleep or something it could be helpful, but in 40+ years of driving Iāve had āfalling asleep at the wheelā problems maybe 3 times - not something I need constant help for.