Words&Dirt

“‘I had no master. I taught myself.’

‘How?’

‘From books.’

‘Books!’ (This in a tone of the utmost contempt.)

‘Yes, indeed. There is a great deal of magic in books nowadays. Of course, most of it is nonsense. No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books. But there is a great deal of useful information too and it is surprizing how, after one has learnt a little, one begins, to see…’”

––Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, pg. 109

“Puzzles so difficult that we can’t help but make mistakes, like playing Jeopardy! and deriving Newton’s second law of thermodynamics, fall in seconds to well-programmed AI. At the same time, no computer vision system can tell the difference between a dog and a cat––something most two-year-old humans can do. To some degree these are apples-and-oranges problems, high-level cognition versus low-level sensor motor skill. But it should be a source of humility for AGI builders, since they aspire to master the whole spectrum of human intelligence. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has proposed an ‘easy’ alternative to the Turing test that shows that complexity of simple tasks. We should deem any robot intelligent, Wozniak says, when it can walk into any home, find the coffeemaker and supplies, and make us a cup of coffee. You could call it the Mr. Coffee Test. But it may be harder than the Turing test, because it involves advanced AI in reasoning, physics, machine vision, accessing a vast knowledge database, precisely manipulating robot actuators, building a general-use robot body, and more.

In a paper entitled ‘The Age of Robots,’ Moravec provided a clue to his eponymous paradox. Why are the hard things easy and the easy things hard? Because our brains have been practicing and refining the ‘easy’ things, involving vision, motion, and movement, since our nonhuman ancestors first had brains. ‘Hard’ thing like reason are relatively recently acquired abilities. And, guess what, they’re easier, not harder. It took computing to show us. Moravec wrote:

In hindsight it seems that, in an absolute sense, reasoning is much easier than perceiving and acting––a position not hard to rationalize in evolutionary terms. The survival of human beings (and their ancestors) has depended for hundreds of millions of years on seeing the moving in the physical world, and in that competition large parts of their brains have become efficiently organized for the task. But we didn’t appreciate this monumental skill because it is shared by every human being and most animals––it is commonplace. On the other hand, rational  thinking, as in chess, is a newly acquired skill, perhaps less than one hundred thousand years old. The parts of our brain devoted to it are not well organized, and, in an absolute sense, we’re not very good at it. But until recently we had no competition to show us up.

That competition, of course, is computers.”

––Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, by James Barrat, pg. 205-6