If you want to do fundamental research, the jobs are very scarce and, in many cases, not particularly good in terms of salary, stability, or location. A postdoc in the life sciences makes $50-65k/year, often either in a) a high cost-of-living area (Boston, SF) or b) a land-grant institution in the middle of nowhere, which is tough with a partner. These are usually short contracts too--mine is renewed annually. Faculty and Pharma jobs pay better, obviously, but are also pretty thin on the ground.
I like doing research that makes the world better, but doing so is an incredible luxury, even coming from a decently middle-class background. If my family were even slightly poorer, there's no way this would be possible and if one of them were to get sick or hurt, I can't imagine how I'd be able to stick it out.
It doesn't have to be this way, obviously. We could fund more stable positions--and I think it'd probably work out to more/better science per dollar spent. But right now...we definitely don't.
I'd change "the best minds" to the "some of the most educated and technically prepared minds".
And it's not only to click ads, there is a whole lot of engineers (even more in poorer countries such as Brazil) who end up working in banks and finance, mostly to deal with complex spreadsheets.
If by "best" we mean, most educated, most capable of solving engineering problems, "highest IQ" etc. (Which is how we generally define best in this context) Then yes.
There used to be a big incentive for the smart scientific and engineering minded types to go into academia, but now the majority go into either financial services or tech work because that is where the high salaries and actual problem solving are.
Well, the idea is that they demand the highest salary and those who pay the highest salary are companies interested in improving ad-clicking. It's not "abstractly best" but "empirically best". If you get the most money, you are by some definition the best.
But, indirectly it becomes an interesting problem (nlp research). If we didn't have people playing / making video games then we wouldn't have figured out GPU acceleration to use with deep networks (backpropagation is fast when you can do matrix multiplication fast).
I’ve heard it also as “making global scale dopamine delivery systems” when bringing in social media KPIs and other addiction-driven engagement like modern gaming monetization models
This is indeed a problem, but Denmark's highways right now have 1/6 of the death rate of US highways, so if saving lives actually was the goal, AI isn't exactly the low hanging fruit.
When I was in Sweden on vacation, I was surprised that almost all except the most minor roads have a central divider. To allow overtaking, they have 2+1 lanes, and then after a few km they switch to 1+2 lanes (extra lane in the other direction).
This eliminates the most deadly accidents (head on collisions) and makes overtaking completely stress free.
It's a simple intervention that you can do almost anywhere, and it saves lives immediately. You only need to invest a bit in concrete barriers and paint.
they set standards for what a street, road, and highway are. and they do not mix them. As a result they are safer, cheaper, and land use has a higher tax revenue.
Sweden has the lowest traffic related deaths of any country [1]. There must be something to it, however it's strange how lackluster the government response was to covid in comparison.
Edit: You think our covid restrictions was successful?
I was making an off topic comment but it was related to the information I gave comparing the wide differences of effort and in turn success of these independent issues. Maybe they weren't interested in that.
I think it would be a lot easier to develop full self-driving than to get Americans to accept and implement the road safety measures that are in place in Denmark. And that's not even counting if there are cultural factors that make Danes better drivers other things being equal. I can't even imagine how many billions of dollars it would take.
Cars won't save us from cars. Having widely available self driving car would save some lives but also set off another front in the culture wars and won't lead to significant changes in our infrastructure or how the burdens of mass driving are distributed.
The common point that you won't see huge structural improvements until human driven cars are gone is true and it's going to be a WHILE.
Even if you had perfect self driving technology the cultural and political capital you'd have to expend to get rid of recreational cars is just astronomical. At that point you may as well ban all of the fucking things, the electric ones aren't better they just shovel the suffering around a bit.
Just because L5 autonomy doesn’t solve every possible externality of driving, doesn’t mean it isn’t a watershed moment in human technological innovation and also massively life-saving and harm-reducing.
The externalities of driving are huge (both positive and negative) but the negative externality of driving accidents is nearly a trillion dollars per year in the US.
So it's easier for us to teach a computer to think than to teach people to think and act differently? Not sure if I agree with that statement, they require very different solutions, one is technical and the other social. I don't think just because the social solution is hard that it makes the technical one easier...
There is at least a glimmer of a suggestion that the technical solution will be workable. Waymo seems to be doing pretty well, and for all Tesla's fumbles, their autopilot seems to do better than humans on freeways in good conditions, which may someday save a nontrivial fraction of the lives lost in car accidents.
On the other hand, nobody has any idea how to get Americans to change their minds on guns, cars, or red meat, and there is no foreseeable course of action that would work. That's not to say it's impossible, but I don't see how to get from here to there. This isn't a case of people just not knowing that if they drove more carefully they'd be at less risk of dying. Public education is not even remotely sufficient to the task of accomplishing the behavior changes we're talking about. Hell, I bet you could spend a hundred billion dollars and not even get to the point of a solid majority agreeing there's a problem to be solved, much less make any progress on solving it.
Changing minds on guns, cars, and red meat is exactly as easy as setting up and constantly reinforcing the original (toxic) narratives around guns, cars, red meat, sugar, and the rest.
It isn't difficult or expensive in its own terms. You don't do it with "public education", you do by consistently dramatising the results you want in popular media, and demonising the results you don't.
Give it ten years of consistent messaging from multiple seemingly independent sources and it's done. Give it twenty five and it's so done the alternatives are no longer thinkable.
The difficult and expensive part comes from the enclosed nature of political power in the US, which has a choke point on the kinds of messages that are allowed to appear in popular media.
Cool, now you just need to convince popular media to include narratives about better road design and use in a way that is subtle enough to avoid pushback but obvious enough to have the intended shaping effect. This sounds both incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive, but you say it's not, and we have no way to test which one of us is right. Agree to disagree. :)
I think Americans are less of an outlier on that subject compared to other countries in the world. In fact, Denmark drinks more per capita than the US. But in any case it wasn't my goal to exhaustively list all the things Americans are stubborn about, just some examples that are ready to hand. ;)
Go look up changing to the metric system in the US. Failed effort billions of dollars. Definitely agree with the prior commentators statement. Technical solitarily already seems in the wild by enhancing driving capability...
Maybe not objectively, but probably for some people. While some could be, many expert engineers wouldn't be expert social scientists or public servants.
Agree. I expect 2050, easily, before there's even the remotest hope of even parity with human drivers.
I'm always astonished at how those most skilled at software, turn around and explain how software is better than humans at task $x. Yet, I've never used a piece of software without bugs. I've never seen a piece of software, not real world capable, which even remotely close to dealing with things, as well as humans.
And the more complex the software, the more bugs. Bugs abound in complex software. Full self driving is as complex as the linux kernel, easily.
How many bugs are in the Linux kernel? Right now?
To even hope, even begin to hope that things will be mostly bug free, bug free beyond human "bugs" when driving, we'd:
- Need to 100% freeze the platform, so the car has zero changes. Ever. Like a Volvo, 10+, 20+ years with only fixes for flaws.
No change in drive train. No change in how the car handles, etc.
- A 100% feature freeze fix for years and years, only bug fixes, no feature add.
It's just not happening overnight. And when it does, cars are going to require an addition of massive sensors, it's not going to be camera or radar, it's going to be camera, radar, lidar, motion, wind, and 50 other environmental sensors.
It's going to be mainine computing power in triplicate. Connectivity and sensors in triplicate. 100%, no way is the AI CPU even slightly network connected. No over-the-air updates.
Bugs cannot happen. Bugs kill. Bad hardware kills.
I do get that having a car self drive, in the desert, in constantly warm temp is an easy thing. Try it at -40C, in a snow storm, with a snow filled road, in the country with no ditches, no lines to see (due to snow), in the dark, when windy, periodic white-outs, and more.
Heck, I'll say there's a chance when AI can drive on a frozen lake. And yes, humans do and can.
So far, all AI driving is monoculture.
Not to mention, how about a 20 year old car? Or even 10? "Buy new?" Now you hate the environment! And 20 year old cars are driven daily by humans, no they aren't the primary cause of accidents, because, when driving you notice issues in the feel of how the car drives.
Can AI "feel" that? Sure! But that means loads and loads of sensors! And cost! ANd repair bills!
To be honest, my 2050 thing is likely mostly due to this. Cost.
What’s the point of comparing the US to countries that are as populous as the DC metro area? There are so many factors at play the comparison is completely meaningless.
Death rate is calculated as deaths per billion miles driven, so I don't see how the respective populations matter here. One could make the argument that population density is important to consider, but in the US the less populated states have higher death rates IIRC.
Denmark (like most countries) are definitely better at not getting killed on the road, but closer to a factor of two by miles driven and four per capita.
> I don't see how the respective populations matter here.
They don’t matter per se. It is just a stat I had in my head that I could provide without googling anything to show how different both countries are. There are so many factors to consider with regards to driving infrastructure and habits, even density is not enough.
I fully agree, it's really hard to compare things like these across national boundaries. The actual countries don't really matter for the point I tried to make anyway: There are large cross-country differences between countries right now, so it seems prudent to look into those if one wants to decrease traffic deaths.
Waiting for L5, even if it actually is achieved in the current AI cycle, will introduce a whole new class of problems once self driving cars become a meaningful share of traffic, e.g. coordination/cooperation between cars and so on.
No, it is a typical response of a guy who spent two years and countless nights studying econometrics and the issues of specification and identification. But thank you for wrongly assuming my nationality and disregarding my response based on that.
Not really. If you spend a dollar now on mosquito nets you might save a life. If you order a Tesla, you have yourself a fancy car that few people in the world can afford.
You can execute a vastly cheaper intervention now, or you can speculate on something that helps in the future at some indeterminate time, probably decades away, that will always cost more.
And to make another point against FSD as a humanitarian intervention. Looking at the highest vehicle deaths per capita (or per no. of vehicles), it over represented by developing nations. What's common to them is poor infrastructure, unpaved roads, older vehicles with less safety features, lack of government enforced safety standards, lack of road rules and enforcement, etc. Worldwide road deaths will be more affected by regulatory interventions, capital spending, etc. FSD won't make a real dint in this number.
If we just look at deaths then sure, this could be right. However malaria is something we know how to tackle and isn’t that expensive. It’d be much more efficient to cure malaria than to eliminate all motor accidents.
I'm sure there will be a ton of residual effects from FSD. One off the top of my head being Emergency Services will be able to respond to emergencies faster because of minimized road congestion.
And? Does that matter if we have better capacity/congestion planning because all the cars are self driving. There's so much wasted time in traffic and excess congestion because humans are at the wheel creating chaotic traffic fluctuations by their driving.
Yes. That does matter, a lot. Look up induced demand. Also consider that full-self driving will likely mean more cars on the road that don't even have a person in them.
Traffic backups and delays aren't just created from people crashing, it's because when you take a a dozen tiny humans and you put each of them in mostly > 15foot long cars, you now have 12 people managing to take up over 180 feet of space.
Speeding up emergency services is a solved problem. You take a lane that is filled with single-occupant vehicles, and you dedicate that to efficient forms of transit, whether it be a high-speed bus lane or a bike lane. Emergency services will not only opt to use that the majority of the time, they will also be less likely to crash with another vehicle due to not needing to weave lane to lane.
That’s definitely not true. The smartest (clearly not the best if you take conscience into account) minds of today work either in ad farms or as money movers. You can sugarcoat it however you want but if you work in google or Facebook you definitely are just farming ads but with extra steps.
Not directly but their work needs to benefit an ad company to be allowed to continue.
Or else it exists in some intersection of corporate benevolence and the work not actively harming the ad company. Which is just not an arrangement I trust sorry.
Plus I mean that's two people. How many people work at google and fb and how many who do get to decide they're going to do something more important than ads?
Or nearly any other field, e.g., mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry/chemical engineering, nearly any of the sciences involved in the medical field (from pharmacology to psychology to name a few). Even "softer" fields like law and literature have present day geniuses pioneering new ground.
I understand that HackerNews is tech centered, but some times when I read "the best minds of my generation are doing X" I wonder if the commenter can see the flashes of brilliance shining beyond their field or what they know as "tech."
I just flicked through a few job ads on the career page of Google Research. All of them describe fundamental research oriented towards improving the commercial services of Google. It is very far from pursuing whatever one is interested in.
If you are one of the smartest people on the planet, you can work on whatever you're interested in. You can, if you want to, work on fundamental research at Google without any direct connections to commercial services of Google. Just look at their publications.
Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”