This is something that I've wondered about when it comes to things like self driving cars, and the difference between good and bad drivers.
When I'm driving I'm constantly making predictions about the future state of the highway and acting on that. For example before most people change lanes, even without using a signal they'll look and slightly move the car in that direction, up to a full second before they actually do it. Or I see two cars that are going to end up in a conflict state (trying to take the same location on the highway) so I pivot away from them and the recovery they will have to make.
Self driving cars for all I know are reactionary. They can't pick up on these things beforehand at this time and preemptively put them self in a safer position. Bad/distracted/unaware drivers are not only reactionary, they'll have a much slower reaction time than a self driving car.
The more you drive the more you notice things. After a few years in the taxi, while going through the tunnel in central Phoenix, I pointed at the cars in the far-left lanes of the freeway and said to my passenger, "you see that car right there? It's going to change into the next lane, and that other guy is going to have to slam on his brakes." My passenger was amazed when exactly this happened seconds later.
Yea but what are you "doing" when you're imagining stuff into the future - you're running some sort of prediction based on the patterns you see in the present. You're planning out moves before you execute them. The biggest difference is accuracy and breadth of simultaneous tracking, and it is relatively difficult to tell when its a good time to slow react or fast react.
This seems obviously wrong? Any system whose name includes the word "forecast" was built to predict the future in some domain / over some time horizon / to some level of granularity.
It's an interesting thought, but isn't that still a statistical response to stimuli based on learned experience? Albeit one more advanced and subtle
It no more requires reasoning about the future as such than does stopping when someone or something is actually in the way (and thus the car will hit it in the future)
I’m not sure about that, I mean this is something that client-side prediction in games is doing all the time, so why wouldn’t a self-driving car do it?
When I'm driving I'm constantly making predictions about the future state of the highway and acting on that. For example before most people change lanes, even without using a signal they'll look and slightly move the car in that direction, up to a full second before they actually do it. Or I see two cars that are going to end up in a conflict state (trying to take the same location on the highway) so I pivot away from them and the recovery they will have to make.
Self driving cars for all I know are reactionary. They can't pick up on these things beforehand at this time and preemptively put them self in a safer position. Bad/distracted/unaware drivers are not only reactionary, they'll have a much slower reaction time than a self driving car.