Move Over Humans - You Learn Too Slowly

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting in on fiery but, intellectual discussion among a few very smart cookies. This discussion centered around the topic of AI and how it relates to machines, specifically autonomous vehicles (ie self-driving cars). The intellectual credit for this specific nugget of insight I must give to Professor Edward Lee of UC Berkeley, as he shared with the group at this meeting of the minds I had a chance to witness.

You probably are assuming I'm about to launch into some technical fun facts and sci-fi fanaticism of a not-so-distance future - sorry, that's just not so. Instead, this not-so-distant future thought will focus on learning.

For all of you that have kids or were a kid (that's everyone reading this, just to be clear), you all probably attempted to touch something hot, at one point - a candle flame, a hot pan, etc.

Immediately after touching that candle flame you learned that you probably shouldn't do that again. We all learned that. We all learned that at different times. Right now, there's a child somewhere in the world learning that fire-is-hot lesson. That's natural. That's how humans learn. But, human learning isn't #1 in the world of wisdom gathering. Not anymore.

What if, when the first child touched that flame, all children learned this lesson simultaneously, and all children born after altered their behavior accordingly? Simultaneous and shared lessons-learned. This is an ideal state of how machines can learn. This is not a human-style version of learning, this is a new type of learning.

Let's make it more serious - if a self-driving car experiences something never before seen and an accident occurs, it learns from that. However, it is not just one car learning, it is all cars learning. Preventing this accident-causing scenario from ever happening again. Yes, yes, of course, sharing of data, across vehicles, etc. is a factor but, the point is sound. Point being that this is a very different way to think about learning and development. Not human learning but, simultaneous learning. Sharing lessons-learned in real time and forever after - moving on to the next lesson and to next.

To some of you, you might have learned this long ago but, I just found out. Share this with people - so we all can learn - just not at the same time....