This item by David Klinghoffer is republished from Science & Culture Today, with some added material.

Talking with Allan CP on The Science Dilemma, Jay Richards punctures some illusions of AI hype. One is that AI is something really new. No, using a familiar search engine like the old Google was a form of AI, which describes any technology that seeks to mimic human intelligence.

Dr. Richards introduces Moravec’s paradox, the insight that it’s often harder to accomplish things that seem easy (e.g., a robot that can effectively move about in three-dimensional space as successfully as, say, a cockroach does) than it is to do things that seem hard (e.g., a computer that’s mastered chess):

Machines can learn to play chess more easily than to walk:

Why is it comparatively easy to develop a program to play chess, as opposed to teaching a robot to walk freely? Moravec’s Paradox offers one explanation:

In the 1980s, computer scientist Hans Moravec laid out this exact challenge — what has now been dubbed “Moravec’s paradox” — and explained why it’s just what we should expect from machines that are immune to the pressures of natural selection…

That is to say, the things humans find easiest are the very things that took millennia of evolution to refine. The things humans find hardest are only hard because they’re new — we’ve been thinking about chess strategy for a little over a thousand years, but we’ve been learning how to interact with our surroundings since our ancestors were single-celled organisms. The skills that are hardwired through evolution don’t take conscious thought, and when you don’t have to think about something, it’s harder to figure out how to teach a machine to do it.

Ashley Hamer, “Moravec’s Paradox Is Why the Easy Stuff Is Hardest for Artificial Intelligence” at Curiosity

The paradox was developed by Hans Moravec, professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and author of Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988) and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1998) In Robot, he argues that “robots will match human intelligence in less than fifty years.”