by Ashutosh Jogalekar
One of my favorite quotes about artificial intelligence is often attributed to pioneering computer scientists Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky. To paraphrase: “The most important thing we have learned from three decades of AI research is that the hard things are easy and the easy things are hard”. In other words, we have been hoodwinked for a long time. We thought that vision and locomotion and housework would be easy and language recognition and chess and driving would be hard. And yet it has turned out that we have made significant strides in tackling the latter while hardly making a dent in the former. The lower-level skills seem to require significantly more understanding and computational power than seemingly more sophisticated, higher-level skills.
Why is this? Clearly one trivial reason is that we failed to define “easy” and “hard” properly, so in one sense it’s a question of semantics. But the question still persists: what makes the easy problems hard? We got fooled by the easy problems because we took them for granted. Things like facial recognition and locomotion come so easily to human beings, even human beings that are a few months old, that we thought they would be easy for computers too. But the biggest obstacle for an AI today is not the chess playing ability of a Gary Kasparov but the simple image recognition abilities of an average one year old. Read more »