There’s a roboticist at Columbia called Hod Lipson who has literally written the book on autonomous vehicles (AVs). Recently I came across an interview with him from a couple of years ago.
“No human driver,” Lipson states, “can have more than one lifetime of driving experience. A car that is part of an AI network can, within a year, have a thousand lifetimes of experience … these cars will drive better than any human has ever driven. They will have experienced every possible situation.”
Question: can a car experience?
Clearly not. Experience is the form of our encounter with the world. Cars don’t have a world to encounter. They do not have experiences.
By the same token: cars can’t become experienced. The situations they traverse don’t make them better cars. They just make them old.
Lipson might respond: “ok, sure, but it’s not just the car. It’s the computer-in-the-car.”
Can a computer experience?
Again, clearly not, and for exactly the same reasons.
Supposing that a combination of non-experiencing beings will lead to an experiencing being is like supposing that a top hat on a snowman will make him dance and sing.
It seems to me that what’s at stake here is the fundamental question of how, or whether, an AI system can replicate, or mimic, our encounter with the world.
Lipson suggests that cars can have experiences because he hasn’t even thought about it.
I think that’s pretty dumb.
Libber leeber 