AI Self-Driving Cars And Sleeping In Them

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.

AI Self-Driving Cars And Sleeping In Them

self-driving cars

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