M2M Day 207: Did I actually accomplish anything this month? It’s hard to say
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For May, my goal is to build the software part of a self-driving car.
A few days ago, I declared that I completed the self-driving car challenge. The result was basically this video of my computer steering a car…
While the output of this month’s experiment was certainly a system that can autonomously control a car, the question remains… What did I personally accomplish this month?
After all, my self-driving car was primary-based on someone else’s open source code (that I lightly adapted and generalized). This open source code was based on a paper written by NVIDIA’s self-driving car research team. The model from the research was based on mathematical techniques (backpropagation, etc.) that were invented outside of NVIDIA’s lab, mainly in university research centers. And I can keep going…
These mathematical techniques are built on top of fundamental insights from calculus, which were invented hundreds of years ago, and so on.
I can also take this in a different direction: The code that I ran was built on top of a machine learning library built by Google, which was build on top of a high-level programming language that was built by others. Additionally, in order to run any of this code, I needed to install the necessary libraries onto my computer. Installing these libraries can be complicated, so I used install services that other people have set up to ease the process.
I can still keep going… but won’t.
So, returning to the question: What did I personally accomplish this month? It’s not exactly clear.
On one hand, I can say that I was able to get a self-driving car system to run locally on my computer, and that I was able to adapt the system to effectively process new sources of data.
On the other hand, I can say that I took the work of a lot of other people and combined it to make a video.
Both are true.
So, did I actually build a self-driving car? Can you say that companies like OnePlus or Xiaomi build smartphones, even if the software is built by Google and the hardware components are built my Samsung, Foxconn, and others?
Does “assembly” counts as “building”, and does “aggregating” count as “learning”?
I would argue yes, but I don’t think it matters.
The more interesting takeaway is this: Sometimes, things that seem challenging or inaccessible are actually much more novice-friendly than they seem. Thus, the difference between “building a self-driving car” and not was my belief that I could figure it out and my attempt in doing so.
In other words, often times, the exclusivity of mastery only exists because most people never pursue “the thing” (based on the assumption that they can’t).
So, I’d like to reframe what I accomplished this month: I didn’t crack the insanely difficult problem of building a self-driving car. Instead, I proved to myself that building a self-driving car (as of today) isn’t actually an insanely difficult problem. At this point, it’s something that I believe most casual hobbyists could figure out.
I think this is a more interesting outcome anyway.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.