Friday, September 22, 2017

It's an interesting question.

Will autonomous cars learn a tit for tat behavior.

This is a question Mr S. proposed a few days ago. Tit for tat is a game theory that social animals try to abide by. Essentially saying, I'm going to be good to you in the hopes you will be good to me.

If you drive around the Bay Area right now you will find that traffic is so bad, that people don't have much of an incentive to be good or polite to other people. The people who are assholes sort of win. The ones who travel the offramp lane and jump back into the freeway right at the last second. I've seen two people duke it out for about a mile in a merge lane. Both of them side by side.  Neither one wanting to budge. There is a ton of road rage these days.

I think this could be entirely be possible because what I've found about algorithms is that once they go in a negative way, it's hard to reverse their behavior. I sort of found this out when the spacebar on my Mac became sketchy. When I first started using it autocorrect would make me look a lot smarter than I am. But if you spend a little time where two words become one, the autocorrect goes wild. It's sort of fascinating in a way.

It's also the reason I think that a lot of these AI things are starting to have to be taken offline.

1 comment:

  1. Mood music ...

    Todd Rundgren -- "Emperor of the Highway":
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7u1f-tGLHQ

    A sample of lyrics:

    "Where did you ever get that gas sucking pig of a car?
    Any real man would drive a stick shift
    Cut me off again and I will punch your lights out
    This is my exit, we shall meet another day ...
    For I am the Emperor of the Highway!"

    :-)

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