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Noticing unusual sounds

2019-10-17 By Antonis Christofides

My dishwasher is marketed as “intelligent”. It has sensors that supposedly help it understand how dirty the plates are. There’s one sensor I wish it had but it doesn’t: it can’t tell whether its rotating arms are really rotating. Sometimes they’re stuck and we find out after it ends.

I can tell whether the arms are properly rotating just by listening to it. If the cover was transparent, everyone would be able to tell just by a quick glance. Why don’t they make a dishwasher that can warn you about it? With all this technology, it looks as if adding such a sensor should be trivial.

My guess is that some seemingly trivial things are actually hard, and this suggests there are limits to automation. When a bearing in my car starts to wear, I can understand it very early from the slight noise (and usually I can tell which one). I do have a sensitive ear, and I’m confident professional drivers can hear much more than I do. Good luck making a driverless truck that can detect unusual noises and tell which are probably OK and which probably need more attention.

Tagged With: ai, autonomous, driverlessFiled Under: Uncategorized

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