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Moravec's paradox

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Observation that perception requires more computation than reasoning

Moravec's paradox is the observation that, as Hans 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".[1]<br>This counterintuitive pattern may happen because skills that appear effortless to humans, such as recognizing faces or walking, required millions of years of evolution to develop, while abstract reasoning abilities like mathematics are evolutionarily recent.<br>This observation was articulated in the 1980s by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others.

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".[2] 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".[3]

By the 2020s, in accordance with 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.[4] 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".[5] There is currently no consensus as to which tasks AI tends to excel at.[6][needs update]

The biological basis of human skills<br>[edit]

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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. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient.

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.[7]

A compact way to express this argument would be:

We should expect the difficulty of reverse-engineering any human skill to be roughly proportional to the amount of time that skill has been evolving in animals.

The oldest human skills are largely unconscious and so appear to us to be effortless.

Therefore, we should expect skills that appear effortless to be difficult to reverse-engineer, but skills that require effort may not necessarily be difficult to engineer at all.

Some examples of skills that have been evolving for millions of years: recognizing a face, moving around in space, judging people's motivations, catching a ball, recognizing a voice, setting appropriate goals, paying attention to things that are interesting; anything to do with perception, attention, visualization, motor skills, social skills and so on.

Some examples of skills that have appeared more recently: mathematics, engineering, games, logic and scientific reasoning. These are hard for us because they are not what our bodies and brains were primarily evolved to do. These are skills and techniques that were acquired recently, in historical time, and have had at most a few thousand...