Exploring the intriguing relationship between sleep and AI, this episode delves into how the need for sleep in humans might inform the development of self-driving car technology. Dr. Lance Eliot discusses the cognitive deficits caused by sleep deprivation and draws parallels to the potential need for downtime in AI systems. He introduces the concept of 'sleep' for self-driving cars, suggesting that this downtime could be used for processing and optimizing learned experiences. The episode raises thought-provoking questions about the future of AI and its operational patterns.
Dr. Eliot explains how AI self-driving cars can actively aid passengers in being able to sleep comfortably during driving journeys. See his Forbes column for further info: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/
"Speaking of which, there's ongoing debate about whether or not self-driving cars are going to be operating 24x7. Your existing car tends to be a sleep while you're not using it, meaning that it is at rest."
Self-driving cars are vehicles that can drive themselves without needing a person to control them. They use special technology to see and understand the road around them.
Self-driving cars, also known as autonomous vehicles, are equipped with technology that allows them to navigate and drive without human intervention. They use a combination of sensors, cameras, and artificial intelligence to understand their environment and make driving decisions.
"For those that are thinking they're going to turn their self-driving car into a 24x7 ride-sharing service, meaning that while the owner is not using the self-driving car it will be driving around earning money by giving rides."
A ride-sharing service is a way for people to get rides from drivers using their own cars, usually booked through an app on your phone. It's like calling a taxi, but it's often cheaper and more flexible.
A ride-sharing service is a transportation option where drivers use their personal vehicles to provide rides to passengers, typically arranged through a mobile app. This model allows for flexible transportation without the need for traditional taxi services.
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Hi, I'm Dr. Lance Elliott and welcome to my podcast series about self-driving cars.
In this episode I'll be discussing the topic of sleeping self-driving cars.
If you've become interested in more about self-driving cars please see my website
www.ai-self-driving-cars.guru for further information.
Okay, let's get started. How long can you go without sleep?
We've all done an all-nighter when studying for a final exam. As a software developer you've
likely gone several seemingly sleepless nights while trying to hit that all-important deadline
for getting the software done and out the door. For most people going for about three days without
sleep is as far as they can go. Some years ago radio stations and even TV shows had contests
to see who could avoid going to sleep the longest. In some instances there were situations such as
having to stand and put your palm on a car and whomever lasted the longest would win the car.
These tests of human endurance about sleep were gradually either outlawed or were considered
of such poor taste that they are rarely have ever done these days. In 1965 there's the famous case
of a 17 year old student in high school that sought to make a new record for the longest
officially recognized time without sleep. During a science fair he managed to avoid sleep for about
11 days and recorded 264 hours. Researchers have done similar kinds of studies and found
that some can avoid sleep for around 8 to 10 days but this is not the usual case. Furthermore as you
might guess the subjects begin to get quite irritable and difficult to deal with. You likely
know people at work that seem to get insufficient sleep and tend to exhibit various cognitive
deficits or dysfunctions. Most commonly there's a gradual reduction in ability to concentrate
and the mind of the sleepless person begins to wander. Motivation usually drops and the person
becomes confused about what they were doing and why they were doing it. All in all there's a
definite and apparent degradation in mental processing and especially at the higher levels
of abstract reasoning and thinking. Motor functions of the human body can also be impacted
by a lack of sleep. There have been cases of drivers that got so drowsy that they reported
they weren't able to move their feet onto the brake fast enough to avoid an accident. One that
they would normally have been able to avoid if they had been more fully alert. Sensory perception
is often impacted by sleepiness. People that have been deprived of sleep will sometimes hear
sounds that aren't there or see images that aren't there and otherwise be unable to accurately
make use of their normal sensory capabilities. There have been cases of drivers that swore
that they saw an animal dart in front of their car and so they swirled and got into an accident
when in fact there was no indication at all that an animal had been there and it was instead
attributed to lack of sleep that the driver had reported. Now you can try to fight going to sleep
but the body and mind seem to force you ultimately into a state of sleeping. As the famous saying goes
you can delay sleep but you cannot defeat it. Experiments with rats showed that by going without
sleep for two weeks the rats actually died. The experimenters kept forcing the rats to
stay awake and eventually they just collapsed entirely and died. There's debate about whether
the sleeplessness actually caused the death and so we aren't here dealing with that acrimonious
debate. The main point is that it seems like humans and indeed apparently all animals seem
to need to sleep. When you think about the nature of sleep you realize how dangerous a thing it is.
While you or any animal is asleep it is a heightened risk of survival. You aren't fully
aware of your surroundings. You're subject to someone or something sneaking up upon you.
That someone or something could readily harm you, capture you or kill you. Many animals indeed
undertake elaborate protections when they sleep such as burning to the ground or finding a secluded
spot in a cave or being at the top of a tree. As humans we often close and lock the door to
our bedrooms and sleep in a room that is generally a protective bubble aiming to make sure that we
aren't readily subject to our sleeping state vulnerability. Now why would humans and animals
generally have evolved in such a manner that we needed sleep which as I've just pointed out is a
significant danger to survival. One would certainly think that over time the evolutionary forces would
have led us to not needing sleep doing so by out surviving those that do need sleep and yet sleep
still persists. There must be a really really good reason for sleep. No one can say for sure why we
do need sleep. One argument is that we need sleep to give the body a chance to recover and recuperate.
After a long day of effort presumably your body is worn out therefore it would seem to make sense
to force the body into a state of motion list so that it could work toward fixing itself and
getting ready for the next day's efforts. If this were the case though you might ask why couldn't we
just rest. In other words rather than entering into actual sleep suppose that we just let our body
rest for a couple of hours each night. Wouldn't that take of the take care of the my body needs
recovery aspects. The counter argument is that many people and animals maybe would not be careful
enough to let their bodies rest and so this sleep mechanism comes to the forefront to force us to
let our bodies rest. With the mind also going into sleep mode it would then force the body to have
resting time. Were the mind to continue to remain active it might over tax the body and keep the
body going all the time ultimately destroying the body. If the body gets destroyed the mind has no
place to go. Thus the mind must enter into sleep whether it wants to or not in order to keep the
body going by allowing the body to rest and for which then the mind still has a means to function
because the body is kept in good shape. Now that's a theory though many don't buy into it.
Instead the belief is that the mind also needs sleep. In fact there are some camps that say
that it is really only the mind that needs to sleep not the body. They assert that the body
could be kept going all the time. The mind is the weak link in all the sleep stuff. If you could
keep the mind from going to sleep the body could rest enough at times to keep going all the time.
The only reason that the body goes to sleep is due to the mind going to sleep.
When the mind sleeps the body has nothing to control it and so the body just naturally goes
into a motionless state. I'm sure that you know though that the mind does not seem to
truly go to sleep. There used to be a belief that the mind entirely went dormant during sleep.
The neurons in the brain activity were assumed to stop. We now know this is not the case.
There is definitely activity in the brain during sleep. Instead you might be aware of
REM rapid eye movement a sleep phase found in at least mammals and birds involving rapid
eye movements low muscle movements and the likelihood of dreams occurring. Now do animals
dream? Well researchers have tried to show that it seems that they do including studies of birds
that suggested that they were dreaming while asleep. People often say that they dream last night
and are sure that they dream but they cannot remember the dream itself. They also will claim
that it was their first dream in weeks. Generally though this is considered perhaps a false
recollection. You normally are dreaming whenever you sleep. It is only that some of those dreams
do you ever seem to become aware of after having come out of sleep. There's also the chance that
you believe you dreamed but in fact it is entirely made up. You believe that dreams can be remembered
so you convince yourself that you had a dream and you claim you can remember it when maybe you
didn't dream at all. People and animals that go without sleep for a while are prone to cognitive
deficits and dysfunctions. We might therefore use this as a clue about the nature of sleep.
Why would we for example hallucinate once we've been deprived of sleep? What is going on during
sleep in the mind that without sleep the mind turns towards hallucinations? A prevailing
theory about the mind during sleep is that it is reorganizing itself. Pretend for a moment that
you're working in an office that has lots of filing cabinets. During the day your inbox gets
filled up you try to process things and move them into your outbox. Meanwhile you're also filling
the paperwork into the cabinets. You want the paperwork to be ordered in some helpful way
and perhaps you've opted to label the cabinets by the alphabet. You place some of your files into
the cabinets marked A to D and later on when you need to find that paperwork you'll know to look
in the A to D labeled cabinet to find it. So some believe that the human brain works kind of in that
same way. During wakefulness your brain is trying to process all of your sensory input coming into
the inbox and producing output via the outbox such as speaking or waving your arms or whatever.
The brain is filling memories as fast as it can while you're awake. Maybe the brain can only do
so much while also needing to pay attention to the world. Perhaps it needs dedicated downtime
to be able to properly organize memories and file them into the right places.
One reason why this theory seems plausible is that when you have dreams it could be that a
dream is really a snapshot of the filing that is going on. Things are kind of in a mess during
the filing process and the dream inadvertently arises from that mess. This explains why dreams
often involve aspects that are seemingly unrelated. They are merely crisscrossing throughout the brain
as they're being filed into their appropriate spot. This also explains why there is activity in the
brain during sleep. It is doing in parlance of software what we oftentimes refer to as garbage
collection. Some stuff in the brain is being filed, some stuff is being discarded, maybe,
some stuff is being transformed, some stuff is being packed or compacted, and so on.
Another fitting piece of this puzzle involves the mind gradually become cognitively dysfunctional
when denied sleep. If we use the garbage collection theory that I've just mentioned,
we could suppose that the brain is in a waking state, eventually reaches a threshold,
that the amount of input has piled up so much that the brain can no longer properly function.
It's like an office that begins to have piles upon piles of files and folders all over the
floor and sitting in the shelves. Until it all gets relabeled and placed neatly into the filing
cabinets, it becomes harder to use and begins to just get entirely jumbled. Our hallucinations
are perhaps a combination of the mental input spilling over and getting mixed with our normal
conscious cells. The mind gets full of garbage that needs to be organized and transformed,
but since it has been denied filing time, the sleep time, it does what it can in real time
to keep processing in spite of the junk mixing into everything. Another, after being denied
sleep for an extended period of time, by and large most humans are able to return back to a
normal state after getting so-called catch-up sleep. This again fits well with the garbage
collection theory, presumably once the mind gets a chance to sleep. It then continues the garbage
collection. It could be that the pile of trash in the mind takes an extra amount of sleep time to
properly organize and get set up for normal mental processing. A recent study on sleep found that
upside-down jellyfish sleep. This was unexpected since they do not have a brain per se. Jellyfish
makes use of a decentralized network of nerve cells. Biologists say that this is the first time
that an animal without a centralized nervous system has actually been shown to sleep. If this
kind of jellyfish really do sleep, and since they evolved from a lineage going back around 542 million
years, it once again suggests that sleep is a very long time needed factor. You might wonder though
that if sleep is due to the mind needing time off, do jellyfish really need time off to let their
decentralized nerves do something? Experts are puzzled by this, more research needs to be done.
Now, what does all of this have to do with AI artificial intelligence self-driving cars?
At the Cybernetics Self-Driving Car Institute, we're making use of sleep as an AI mechanism
for self-driving cars. This is a novel idea few others are pursuing. We explain next our
rationale for why we think this has some merit. First, let's focus on an overall argument about
the nature of AI and how we will ultimately achieve AI. Some believe that the only path to true AI
involves being able to ultimately mimic human intelligence. Since human intelligence appears
to depend on sleep, we presumably need to crack the code on why sleep is needed and then either
have systems that do something like sleep or actually really go to sleep in the same manner as
the human mind. Thus, if you're pursuing AI, you should also be wanting to pursue the nature of
the human mind and how it works and also therefore what sleep does and why it is seemingly so important
to the human mind and presumably the ability to think. I'll note that there are some AI researchers
that believe we don't need to know how the human mind works in order to achieve intelligence in
machines. They say that there is more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak. For them, if you can
get a machine to exhibit the same characteristics as human intelligence, then how you got there is
immaterial to the matter at hand. Others say that those trying to fight other means to get
two intelligence are barking up a false tree and ought to get back to figuring out how human
intelligence actually works. Anyway, let's go ahead and assume that there's a need for sleep
and cognition and therefore there might be a basis for having sleep occur in AI. In the case of an AI
self-driving car, what does this translate into? One perspective is that the AI of the self-driving
car needs downtime to be able to process all the inputs and processing and memories that we're
collecting during its wakefulness state. This is in keeping with the earlier mentioned theory
about the purpose of sleep in humans is for when software-related garbage collection must take
place. When a self-driving car is not otherwise in motion and functioning as a working car,
we can use the downtime for the self-driving car to do a similar kind of systems-related garbage
collection. This, though, admittedly is not an entirely satisfying answer, so that you could
presumably just add more processors and even offload processing to a remote centralized
server, which then could enable the garbage collection while the self-driving car is still
in an operating mode and not require any actual downtime of the self-driving car.
Speaking of which, there's ongoing debate about whether or not self-driving cars
are going to be operating 24x7. Your existing car tends to be a sleep while you're not using it,
meaning that it is at rest. Right now there aren't any smarts per se on your conventional car,
so you could suggest that the body of the car is resting, but not the mind. In one way, though,
this might seem odd. It does kind of make sense in that suppose your car was operating continuously
24x7, how much could your car engine take? Is it really made to be continuously operating?
For those that are thinking they're going to turn their self-driving car into a 24x7
ride-sharing service, meaning that while the owner is not using the self-driving car it will
be driving around earning money by giving rides. We need to consider how realistic that will be.
Cars are not particularly made in such a manner that it is expected that they will continuously
be in operation. I'm not saying that they cannot operate continuously. I'm just saying we're going
to see a different pattern of when and how cars break down and need repairs in comparison to how
cars are operating today. But getting back to the parallels between sleep and humans and the
potential need for sleep and AI, there is the point already made about the role of garbage
collection. For our self-driving car software we're making use of the processes the self-driving car
when it's not being used, such as the self-driving car is parked, not in motion, and not tasked with
any direct activity. Essentially mimicking the sleeping notion and having the system review
what it has most recently learned. This allows the self-driving car to create new approaches to
driving and put into fast indexing lessons learned. During the normal driving of the
self-driving car the AI is very busy with just driving the car so this downtime can be put to
hand to use. We also believe there are more mental aspects underlying sleep than what is known or
theorized currently. Using large-scale artificial neural networks we're simulating various hypotheses
about other facets of sleep. We are exercising processing changes across the neural network
to simulate sleeping like states in terms of potentially serving to tune the mind. This
we believe is more than just filing of memories. For AI self-driving cars whether you believe
that they should sleep or not we can at least be spurred by the concept of sleep to leverage that
when the physical body, in this case the car, is not being used. This is an opportunity to leverage
the then underutilized AI that is presumably otherwise dormant when the car is not actively
engaged in motion and driving. I hope that our efforts will spur others to give due consideration
to why sleep is so crucial to humans and cognition and in what ways might that be applied
to AI and also AI self-driving cars. I ask that you sleep on it. Well thanks for listening. Again
I'm Dr. Lancite. I hope that you found today's episode informative. If you're interested in
more about self-driving cars please see my website www.ai-self-driving-cars.goo-room-prefer.
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