Intuition and self-driving cars

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The expectation is that artificial intelligence and algorithms will develop at such an accelerated rate that you could call it exponential. This means that the development will be such that at some point the growth curve will be almost like a straight line upwards. And that means that you have to expect that the human mind will no longer be able to follow what the computer is doing. This Singularity situation concerns the speed with which the computer calculates things, but also the speed and complexity with which the algorithms increase. However, man has something that the computer, or an algorithm, could never calculate. Namely intuition, which is the entry into consciousness of the concepts, which does not involve arithmetic, but which is an incorporeal process, which cannot be captured by a device.Watch video on YouTube

From those who are aware of artificial intelligence, is that it is developing at such an accelerated rate that you could call it exponential. That means that - at the beginning of such a growth curve, it all seems to go very quietly, but then at a certain moment it accelerates, which then becomes such that at a certain moment it almost runs up as a straight line. And that means that, yes, it develops into infinity, in a very short time, and that you have to expect, when you talk about artificial intelligence, that the human mind will no longer be able to follow what the computer is doing.Yes, when we look at the seventeen SDGs of the United Nations, as I said last time, you actually miss the most important thing there, namely the goal of protecting and stimulating human freedom that lies in people's thinking and talent, but you also miss the point on which the whole plan, the whole regulation, the whole idea that is conceived there is actually based, namely the prospect of ever further increasing technology, the ever further increasing influence of artificial intelligence. That's not what it says, you can see it more or less in most of the goals behind the screen that that plays a major role, but there is not one indication that that is actually the major driving force for the 21st century. And yes, I have already said that this is actually a deep untruth, because if you feel, experience, what these seventeen goals are based on, then it is on our technical possibilities. And you would expect that there would also be a separate department for that, where you could consider what is actually being planned. I was first introduced to the concept of the singularity a number of years ago - I don't remember, it may have been 2017, before that I was unfamiliar with the concept, although there is a book that dates back to 2002 or so, so one should be familiar with the term - but I wasn't familiar with it and since then I've actually understood that the expectation, from those who are aware of artificial intelligence, is that it is developing at such an accelerated rate that you could call it exponential. That means that - at the beginning of such a growth curve, it all seems to go very quietly, but then at a certain moment it accelerates, which then becomes such that at a certain moment it almost runs up as a straight line. And that means that, yes, it develops into infinity, in a very short time, and that you have to expect, when you talk about artificial intelligence, that the human mind will no longer be able to follow what the computer is doing. Well, that's very worrying, in the years when the computer was being developed and we weren't so worried about it yet, I learned at some point that it existed and I went to see it, someone wanted to show me that computer at the company where he worked. It was a machine as big as a small room and he showed me how, when you start up such a machine, it starts rattling and calculating all over the place, checking everything and only then is it actually ready for use. At the time I wanted, I had a longing, to understand how the development of that device came about and what exactly happens, and I started looking for it, I think it was 1990 or so, and I couldn't find it. Until there was a patient with whom we talked about this and he was a computer specialist and he said: I have a very old book in Dutch about how the computer works, but I want it back. So unfortunately I no longer have it. I looked it over and then you get some idea, in any case much more than what else can be found about it, some idea of how this calculator - which is what it actually is - started, the technology of it. And then you should imagine that you have to see the 'skill' of the machine, that you have to see it in an acceleration of development, until it gets to such an acceleration, that it disappears from sight altogether. Then we can no longer follow it with our minds. So that was already almost impossible in 1990, because you couldn't find the literature, at least not as a layperson, but you can imagine that in 2040, let's say, it will have taken on a form whereby as a human being you can actually look more or less in amazement or horror at all the things that are possible, what you as a human mind may still know when it comes to making the programme, but when it comes to understanding exactly what the computer can do and how it does it, that you really can't follow it anymore, and that you could imitate it as a human being is completely unthinkable. And that, that unbelievable calculation capacity that machine has, that man could never keep up with with the biological and with the spiritual mind, you have two poles of our capacity to know. The fact that that is the case brings the arrogance associated with the development of artificial intelligence. And we all know that by now there are also self-learning machines, where the computer is programmed in such a way that it is able to learn from mistakes, but also from increasing data, and thus to develop itself, as it were, while the human being is outside of this. Well, you can imagine, that becomes a power in itself that we can only hold on to, stand in it, if we find in ourselves the area that the computer knows nothing about and cannot know anything about. Of course, that is absolutely denied by hard artificial intelligence, that it would exist, an area in man that cannot be found by a machine, but I can guarantee you that that area exists, because once you have found it in yourself, yes, then of course you know that it exists and then the whole world can come and say: it doesn't exist - but that doesn't work any more, because you know that it exists. And that makes you develop a different kind of trust in, let's say, the impossibility of the singularity. In a way, that is possible, that a technology comes into being that disappears from our sight, that we can no longer reach with our minds, but we as humans also have something inside us that the computer can't reach and yes, what you have to do is very simple, you have to develop that part in your human being. Well, I do put it that way, but there are also certain very light point-like proofs that are coming in that this is indeed the case. That the possibility of the human being is in some ways much less than that of the singularity, but that on the other hand, the possibility of the singularity lags and will continue to lag far behind what the human being has in terms of intuitive understanding. And intuitive is a word that is used in all sorts of areas, of course, but when you know it as the entry into your consciousness of the concept, when you consider it as intuition, and you get to know it, you start to experience more and more how it is produced in you, then you know: we as humans have on the one hand an unwieldy intellect which, I repeat, really cannot do what artificial intelligence can do, but on the other hand we have a genius of understanding and it does not calculate. It sees. It does not need to calculate, it knows. Directly, immediately. And during the years that I was searching, a book had already been published by the well-known Roger Penrose, translated into Dutch as "De nieuwe kleren van de keizer" (The Emperor's New Clothes), a man who didn't explain exactly what the computer does, but who went into it quite a bit, and who showed certain experiments in very simple situations in which a human being immediately knows what's going on and in which the computer is calculating itself out of its mind. And just because he is so fast, he might eventually come up with the right answer, because he has a certainty of probability, so he approaches the certainty, so he might be wrong, but all right, let's say he does it well, then he had to take so incredibly many steps to get there, where we immediately see how it is, that when you see that and when you start to see that in yourself, you do get a great admiration for the human ability to think and especially to understand. And now I had bought Klaus Schwab's book on the fourth industrial revolution, and at the end, after a whole discourse, there are a number of prospects for upheavals to be expected between now, which was 2016, and 2025. So we place ourselves in 2015 - it will have been written then- there are then predictions, or actually more or less questions to people: what do you think, would that be largely already the case in 2025? And so there is a piece about self-driving cars.
The transformation would be when 10% of all cars on American roads are self-driving. And then a number of people are questioned about whether that could be the case in 2025. And then 79% - and I don't know what kind of people they asked, of course, but they assume that the transition will have been made by then, in fact. And then he says that in 2016, let's say, the big groups Audi and google are already testing self-driving cars and all kinds of new solutions are being developed and that this is happening very quickly, and this is a statement by Klaus Schwab: 'Such vehicles can, under certain circumstances, be more efficient, but also safer, than cars that are steered by humans. Moreover, it could reduce congestion, reduce CO2 emissions and would totally revolutionise traffic and logistics models."
Well, I do remember that for a while there was a lot of talk about that and a lot of speculation about how soon it would be a reality. And at a certain point you don't hear anything about it any more and then of course the development continues, but you don't hear so many heroic stories about it any more. So when I read this, I looked it up again: what is the current state of affairs, and these are very different reports, as is always likely to depend on the position of the person issuing the report. But there has been a study, a statistical study in 2022 among Dutch people, which showed that 44 of the 100 people questioned would never get into a self-driving car. That can all change of course, but that is how it is experienced. So there is not much confidence yet. I found a whole article about the status of the development of the self-driving car in 2021, in which it is stated that it went very quickly indeed, that they very quickly managed to keep a car within the lane, that the distance to other cars is handled correctly, that it is possible to stop even in a chaotic situation. These are, in fact, three major pillars of development, and in the excepted areas, these cars are doing very well. But don't put them in the city, because that's not possible at all, that would cause the highest number of accidents, because artificial intelligence doesn't succeed in predicting the behaviour of traffic participants. So of course this is something that is so multifaceted and has so many aspects, and which can also change every second. And then you're at a crossroads, for example, with maybe fifty road users, walkers, cyclists, drivers, and they all have this brilliant intuitive ability and they do exactly the opposite of what the computer calculates. Because you can feed it as much data as you like, it has to calculate them all and then arrive at a probability and that's what it does, but all those traffic participants have a completely different way of arriving at decisions and that goes like lightning, it's done in a flash, they see it straight away. Of course, mistakes are made when someone is dozing off or walking around with a lot of worries or not paying attention. This may not be the case in the end with self-driving cars, but generally speaking, people have a great ability to do the right thing in a chaotic situation. And this is not because they have made a billion calculations in one second, I'm just guessing, but because they see it immediately. And so they know: I must do this. And it just doesn't work, to get that under control. What the producers would like is to be able to read the mobile phones in the pockets of all people, to be able to determine their location. Because then they would be able to know much more about the situation and what could possibly happen, based on this location determination. But yes, of course that's an item, it's just not possible to do, to map the entire world population with the location where the people are, so the difficulties are gigantic and the article ended with the statement that it will take some time before this succeeds, if it ever does, it said - and I wonder about that too. This is not only true in the case of self-driving cars. This is an example of the difficulties that technology encounters when these devices come into contact with intuitively gifted human beings. Of course, you can say: yes, as an intuitively gifted human being, I would also like to have that of the computer, so I connect to the computer, then I can also have that, that speed of calculation, and I also have my intuitive ability. Well, we could talk about that sometime. Whether that's possible, whether you don't overwhelm your intuitive capacity with all that arithmetic. But the other way round, that the intuitive power could be included in the artificial intelligence, I think that is absolutely impossible, because it takes place in an area that is beyond the body. And how are you going to use a device to get a grip on something that is not registered anywhere. You only have the consequences of that intuition. Namely the action, for example. Of course, you can see some things from that. But what precedes it, that's what it's really about, the knowledge process that precedes the action, you can't get to that. You can find a lot in the human brain, you can find a lot in the blood circulation, in the state of the temperature of the body for example, there are a lot - blood pressure for example is also something like that - measurements that you could use to deduce, statistically speaking, what is going on in someone. But the intuitive capacity - and that is what every person does - does not lie in the physical function. And that is what I would have liked to say today, and I hope I have done so.Intuition and self-driving cars by Mieke Mosmuller