In the 90's, John McCarthy was calling Go "the new Drosophila of AI". Now, we have AlphaGo that is "just" a bunch of "generic" deep learning with MC. Maybe John McCarthy was right and the ideas behind AlphaGo are the first steps toward true AI. I am very impressed.
These neural nets are really smart, and we don't know exactly how they work, we know only in principle. But if we asked the guy who made the self driving car what is the role of the 17th neuron in the 14th layer, he would probably have no idea. Just like human brains evolve through learning, so do neural nets. Yet many people think they are just clever tricks and not truly intelligent.
That's because they're not intelligent. They're layered function approximators with some specialisations for vision - conv layers. Their structure is designed by humans as is the data they are fed with. Maybe the human brain is the same, IMO it isn't. Humans seek out new experiences and can introspect and at their best assess their level of knowledge of a sibject. DNNs cannot.
Did you read the paper? They did not teach it to drive a car. The car just does lane keeping - it doesn't even do turns or lane changes. This is stuff solved 10+ years ago. And even then it only achieves 98% autonomy on lane keeping - this is a task that needs 100% accuracy. You should not be running into the median every couple miles.
Sounds like McCarthy was right: the point of Drosophila is that it's a very small, simple model organism. You're not supposed to "solve biology" by modelling something in Drosophila, you're just supposed to be able to narrow the field to hypotheses that are not so flagrantly stupid they fail in a fruit-fly.
