An interesting piece by Kelly Clancy: A
COMPUTER TO RIVAL THE BRAIN
“Early in the history
of artificial intelligence, researchers came up against what is referred to as
Moravec’s paradox: tasks that seem laborious to us (arithmetic, for example)
are easy for a computer, whereas those that seem easy to us (like picking out a
friend’s voice in a noisy bar) have been the hardest for A.I. to master. It is
not profoundly challenging to design a computer that can beat a human at a
rule-based game like chess; a logical machine does logic well. But engineers
have yet to build a robot that can hopscotch. The Austrian roboticist Hans
Moravec theorized that this might have something to do with evolution. Since
higher reasoning has only recently evolved—perhaps within the last hundred
thousand years—it hasn’t had time to become optimized in humans the way that
locomotion or vision has. The things we do best are largely unconscious, coded
in circuits so ancient that their calculations don’t percolate up to our experience.
But because logic was the first form of biological reasoning that we could
perceive, our thinking machines were, by necessity, logic-based.”
Related:
“The Relentless Pace of Automation”
by David Rotman
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603465/the-relentless-pace-of-automation/
Robots will
destroy our jobs – and we're not ready for it
As Goldman
Embraces Automation, Even the Masters of the Universe Are Threatened
A short
history of AI schooling humans at their own games