Mark sez

So did you guys see the thing about Google's self-driving car? Apparently they've just been beavering away at that thing for the past few years, ever since the success of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and now they've got a bunch of Priuses equipped with radar and lidar sensors which are capable of driving in city traffic, getting on and off busy interstates, and generally handling all aspects of driving a car around without the need for human intervention. Seriously, why hasn't this gotten more attention? It's an amazing achievement which -- despite my professed belief in technological progress -- I never really thought I'd see in my lifetime. I guess it's just another example of that rule about artificial intelligence: "Real" AI is twenty years away, and always will be. Because as soon as a computer becomes capable of doing something -- proving theorems, identifying things in a visual field, beating Garry Kasparov at chess, flying a plane, and now driving a car -- that something no longer counts as "real" AI.