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Concept
Moravec's paradox
Summary
Moravec's paradox is the observation in artificial intelligence and robotics that, contrary to traditional assumptions, reasoning requires very little computation, but sensorimotor and perception skills require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. Moravec wrote in 1988, "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 below the level of conscious awareness. "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". Steven Pinker wrote in 1994 that "the main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard."
By the 2020s, in accordance to Moore's law, computers were hundreds of millions of times faster than in the 1970s, and the additional computer power was finally sufficient to begin to handle perception and sensory skills, as Moravec had predicted in 1976. In 2017, leading machine learning researcher Andrew Ng presented a "highly imperfect rule of thumb", that "almost anything a typical human can do with less than one second of mental thought, we can probably now or in the near future automate using AI." There is currently no consensus as to which tasks AI tends to excel at.
One possible explanation of the paradox, offered by Moravec, is based on evolution. All human skills are implemented biologically, using machinery designed by the process of natural selection. In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design.
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