Nanohedron wrote:
Quoting the article:
Quote:
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.
When you put it that way, my doofus moments sound almost forgivable.
(To which Denny might have said, "Almost...")
I have a couple of reactions to that. I read something awhile back that possibly the biggest challenge in automated manufacturing is sewing. Sewing? you say; kids learn that at an early age. Robots have been welding for decades, people don't master welding till they're in their 20's. But it comes from what's quoted above. Fabric is not uniform. It bunches and stretches, while metal is rigid. And people have evolved to deal with soft stuff, while the combination of AI and machines haven't evolved to be able to deal with that.
A few weeks ago, Dilbert had a week on Dilbert's attempt to make a robot that could mimic human intelligence. He was unsuccessful till he discovered it was too intelligent to mimic a human. So he made it a little dumber.