Attention Economy


Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Moravec’s Paradox

AI Is Running Circles Around Robotics
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/04/ai-robotics-research-engineering/673608/
The counterintuitive notion that it’s harder to build artificial bodies than artificial minds is not a new one. In 1988, the computer scientist Hans Moravec observed that computers already excelled at tasks that humans tended to think of as complicated or difficult (math, chess, IQ tests) but were unable to match “the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” Six years later, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker offered a pithier formulation: “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research,” he wrote, “is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.” This lesson is now known as “Moravec’s paradox.”