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This is more challenging for robots that it looks to most humans. The phenomenon is called Moravec's paradox. It also explains why no robot is nearly as agile
by nopinsight 9y ago
This is more challenging for robots that it looks to most humans. The phenomenon is called Moravec's paradox.
It also explains why no robot is nearly as agile as a mouse, while computers routinely beat human world champions at many ‘complex’ games.
"Moravec's paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec writes, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".
Similarly, Minsky emphasized that the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are those that are unconscious. "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly"."
"As Moravec writes:
Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- mtw 9y ago"difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility" - hey I can get a robot with vision cameras and a couple of LIDARs to go from point A to B. Better than your one year old.
- jahnu 9y agoMake a robot that can navigate an indoor playground, retrieve an object I asked for and bring it back to me.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- thomasfedb 9y agoBall pit, ladder, disco lights, slippery slide, rope bridge - all things the kid will cope with that will freak your robot out.
- meesterdude 9y ago> Ball pit, ladder, disco lights, slippery slide, rope bridge you know how to party!
- jahnu 9y agoFascinating! Thank you. Does make me wonder where programming fits into this. It seems to be both hard for people and hard for AI.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoI'm reminded of a an early Asimov story where mute household robots that are as capable and agile as any human are commonplace, but a computer than can talk is unique in the world and the size of a building.
- ghaff 9y agoDon't remember the specific Asimov but that actually surprises me a bit. Many science fiction writers probably underestimated the difficult of building humanoid robots (for household servants or other purposes). But my impression is that computer speech recognition and speech were preseived as being pretty straightforward. See the original Star Trek for just one example.
- EGreg 9y agoAbstract thought is far more than just gradient descent, alphabeta search or MCTS. Look at the Cyc project. After decades of work, what have they got? So I push back on the idea that computers have already been taught what is essentially REASONING.
- rimliu 9y agoThank you for showing this. This is very interesting and somehow I never saw it mentioned yet.