Sam Anthony

Board Director, The Many Brains Project · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutivescientistengineer

Sam Anthony is an independent researcher and Board Director at The Many Brains Project. He previously co-founded and served as CTO of Perceptive Automata, developing algorithms using cognitive science for autonomous vehicles.

5statements → 1claims → 1claims resolved → 3.4/5average certainty → 3/5average debate potential →

0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 assertion · 2 opinions · 2 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Sam argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted

Anthony: Pedestrians physically punched Cruise autonomous cars in 2017

“So, in particular I think it was in 2017, the incident reports from crews, there were two or three times where somebody punched the car.”

Sam Anthony Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 8:47 Human Intuition for Machines // Sam Anthony, Perceptive Automata (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

269 words/min while actually speaking · 18.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Sam Anthony: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,780 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said5 Episodes1

Everything Sam Anthony said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Anthony: Autonomous driving cannot be solved with sensors and LiDAR alone

“You can't solve it with sensors. You can't solve it with compute power. You can't solve it with, ah, ah, LiDAR. You can't solve it by knowing exactly where everything, everything is.”

Sam Anthony Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 7:44 Human Intuition for Machines // Sam Anthony, Perceptive Automata (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Insight

Sam Anthony: Physics-only autonomous vehicles struggle to predict human intent

“So that sort of obvious inference is something that we as humans do effortlessly, and that if you just have a box, if you have an autonomous vehicle that's just, you know, rendering everything as moving physics objects in the world, Is difficult verging on imp…”

Sam Anthony Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 2:18 Human Intuition for Machines // Sam Anthony, Perceptive Automata (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Opinion

Sam Anthony: AV developers undervalue human intent inference in driving

“I think that very effortlessness has led to an undervaluing of the difficulty of the situation by people building autonomous vehicles.”

Sam Anthony Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 3:21 Human Intuition for Machines // Sam Anthony, Perceptive Automata (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Insight

Anthony: Explicitly modeling human judgment misses most real-world behavioral features

“If you tried to model it explicitly, if I sat here, and you know, I've been doing this for years, if I sat here and wrote down a list of all of the things that matter for these judgments, I would miss the majority of the features that people use in an actual s…”

Sam Anthony Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 19:26 Human Intuition for Machines // Sam Anthony, Perceptive Automata (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)