We have built artificial heart, lung, hand, leg, etc. Sadly,  no one has built a artificial brain because those neurology guys have no idea how the brain works. It leaves the AI people (many have are cognitive scientists) no choice but building some so-called neural networks which do the work of shuffling Chinese characters in “Chinese Room” without understanding a word of Chinese. This is exactly what people are doing for autonomous drive.

You do not teach your child how to drive by showing him how to handle, say, 1000 different scenarios and let him mimic you for these 1000 different situations. You would not expect your child come back alive next day because there are infinite number of scenarios out there.

Indeed, robot/automation sectors have achieved stunning results, tightening bolts, filling beer bottles and so on by mimicking only. However, for autonomous drive, mimicking without understanding will not bring us too far.

Waymo has taught its “artificial-intelligent driver” already for 2,777,585 km in 8 years and it is still not ready, because it still does not understand driving. An average “non-artificial-intelligent” person needs only 40 hours of driving lessons to get his license, because he understands it!

AI is painful.

Now, the big question is how the brain works. Only after we understand that, we’ll make a computer (but not limited to it) to understand (and learn) things.